Bookmark BostInno on iPhone and you get this button!
This week, a hundred companies you know and love dumped tons of money and countless man-hours into developing iPhone Apps you will never use. It might be really cool but chances are you’ll never think to look for it. Or maybe you will look for it and find it, but it just won’t offer what you want on your iPhone or iTouch.
Some companies feel that an iPhone App is the perfect solution for users so they shell out the cash. Other companies build their apps on the cheap. But as with social media, sometimes getting involved in everything you can do online as a company (and not everything you should do) can lead to nothing but wasted time, lost revenues and serious frustration trying to make sure it’s all engaging.
The truth is, even if an iPhone App makes sense for a small portion of a website’s users, it can be a big waste of time and money.
That’s why BostInnovation is offering a compromise: our new iPhone button. Here’s how I made it in two simple steps:
Let me show you how it works and then I’ll give you the two quick steps to make one for your website.
Here’s how BostInnovation.com looks in the iPhone Safari browser:
To bookmark our website (or any other) on iPhone, all you have to do is click the little “+” symbol at the bottom of the page. When you do, you’ll see this page:
Next, click “Add to Home Screen” and you’ll be prompted to make a title for the bookmarked link. That prompt looks like this:
I changed the title of the site to “Binno” so that it displays nicely once it’s on my home screen. If you leave the title alone, iPhone can’t display the whole title of the site, so it doesn’t look as clean. Here’s how it looks once it’s on the home screen:
So how did I make the icon?
First, I created a .png file that was a 45 pixel by 45 pixel square. I did this in Adobe Illustrator, but you might just be able to have a graphic designer whip it up for you quickly. It can be a simple graphic. You can see ours (at the top of this post) is just our basic “B” Twitter logo with the company logo below.
You don’t have to add gloss to it or round the corners; iPhone is smart enough to do that for you.
Second, I titled the file apple-touch-icon.png and added that file to BostInnovation’s root directory (our “Public HTML” file on BostInno’s FTP server). That’s a pretty simple drag and drop with a free FTP client like Filezilla.
Voila! It’s that simple. If you’re just pushing content through your site and don’t need an iPhone App to do anything special, this is a fine solution for all of you frantically trying to get an iPhone App developed.
What do you think? Do you have the BostInnovation button on your iPhone? Let us know in the comments.
Tags: Bostinno, Bostinnovation, Edu, iPhone
