Custom WebClip icons on the iPhone or iPod Touch home screen

One of the new features added in the recently released iPhone firmware 1.1.3 (view a complete list of official feature additions in iPhone firmware 1.1.3) is WebClips, which allows iPhone or iPod touch users to create icons on their home screen which link directly to web sites. Clicking on the icon launches Safari and loads the web site each icon links to.

As it turns out, all WebClip icons are not created equal. Though the typical icon that shows up on your home screen when creating a WebClip is basically a picture of the web site the icon links to (zoomed in to the degree Safari was zoomed in when the webclip was created), this isn't always the case. Some websites, like Google's mobile web applications and iPhoneFAQ.org (pictured above) will display a custom icon.

Though the WebClip icon for our humble site is, at present, pretty plain and straightforward - from our perspective it's still leaps and bounds better than

the screenshot style webclip icons. Other sites are providing icons which are awfully pretty and just beg to be clicked.

Creating and providing the custom WebClip icon is simple and very straightforward. It is also possible for sites to provide a custom icon for the entire domain, or even individual webclip icons for each page of the site (if they so desire).

The icons are saved to the web site's root directory and are in the PNG image file format. If you'd like to create your own, view the full naming conventions and instructions for custom WebClip icons.