Mar 08, '11 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: Jwink3101
It also requires that your third party browser has some type of link associated registered with the iOS device. My only experience is Atomic Web (atomic://) but I am sure others have it too.
These instructions are not perfect and there may be better ways to do this but it seems to work for me. Read at the bottom for some discussion on the pros and cons of this method.
Some sites (such as Google) have nice home screen icons. If you want them, first, on your computer, use Safari or any other browser where you can change the User Agent and change it to Mobile Safari. Go to the website of interest and view the source. You are looking for something like this.
This may not always be easy to do but I just searched for 'apple-touch-icon-precomposed' and I am usually able to find it. Go to the URL and download the png file. If the site does not have an icon that is 57x57, I think you will have to create one. There may be other ways to do this. If so, please put it in the comments. Also, there are options as to whether or not iOS adds the glare to the icon. Your best bet is to search and read about iOS meta tags.
To create the Home Screen link:
To set up the home screen, first create a file on your site. For example, with a Gmail link, I called the page gmail.php.
I created the page with something along the lines of the following:
<head> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="gmail-iphone-57x57-p.png" /> <title>Gmail</title> </head>
Change the page to the following. This is for Atomic Web, but you may be able to do it with other browsers. I am not sure about them but you need to find their association.
<?php
header("Location: atomic://https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/#tl/Inbox");
exit();
?>
This method does have some serious disadvantages. The two main ones are:
Your phone opens Safari, loads a page and then opens your other browser. This is not the end of the world and I find it is still faster than opening the browser and going to bookmarks.
And there is no way to save HTML5 databases. Some sites, like GMail, save mail on your phone when you use the home screen links. That is not always the case using my method. How your 3rd-party browser does it depends on the browser.
But there is the obvious advantage of having a home screen link.
As a bonus hint; instead of a website, you can enter a phone number like atomic://tel://1-555-555-5555. You can use an image editor to make an icon for this too.
[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]
