Web and WebWorks Development

[tazzben]

Is there a blackberry equivalent to apple's "apple-touch-icon"; I'm just looking to make that icon that shows up on the home screen look nicer.

Thanks!

[tazzben]

Anyone?  The blackberry blog is somehow doing this, but I can't figure out how.

[tneil]

Are you referring to BlackBerry 6?  On 5.0 you could not bookmark a page to the desktop.

[tazzben]

I'm referencing BB6.

[tneil]

At the moment it doesn't support the apple markup.

[tazzben]

Ok, that's not what I'm asking.  i was asking what the equivalent to the apple-touch icon on BB is?  I know it must exists because if you place the BB  blog on the home screen, they are somehow specifying the icon. 

[tneil]

I believe it is done the same way as setting an icon in the address bar of a browser... here is an example:

http://www.chami.com/tips/internet/110599i.html

[tazzben]

Uh, no it's not.  The short cut icon or whatever you want to call it, is 16x16 and the blackberry browser uses it to create a merged icon of a screenshot with the icon in the lower corner.  However, the blackberry blog is overriding this behavior with a high quality image that then appears on the home screen (same behavior is iOS and Android).

[tneil]

You're right.. I was mistaken..

You can either put an icon file named apple-touch-icon.png in the root of your webserver domain, or add <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/custom_icon.png"/> to your page.

[tazzben]

Thanks! Note for others looking at this thread, the reason I ran into trouble is that apple supports a couple of different touch icons (so does android).  If you don't want apple to "gloss" the icon you use  rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed".  However, after you posted this info it appears that BlackBerry does support apple's touch icon, it just doesn't support apple's precompose icon.  So you can do this:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png" /> 

<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png" /> 

This seems to do the proper thing on each platform.  Having the link second for the iPhone/iPad seems to tell it to follow the precomposed directive and not gloss; and now BB is grabbing the "apple-touch-icon" (which it doesn't gloss anyway).