Make Your Website An App Icon On Your IPad, IPod Touch Or IPhone

If you are in sales and marketing, or run a website, then you’ll love this trick. Ever since Apple iOS 1.1.3, users have been able to add Home Screen Bookmarks to their iOS devices, including the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. These bookmarks look just like Apple App icons and allow you to pull up a page on your website the same way you would open an Apple iOS app. You can even customize the icon with a picture or logo. You can see an example of a MethodShop app icon in the image on the right (4th row, 4th column). Creating a custom bookmark icon is a great idea if you find yourself showing off your website in meetings or at conferences to potential clients and business partners. In this tutorial, we’ll first show you how to create a Home Screen Bookmark, then we’ll walk through the steps required to customize it.

Pull up your website using Apple’s Safari web browser on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. A screen with a bunch of buttons will appear including: Add Bookmark, Add to Reading List, Add to Home Screen, Mail Link to this Page, Tweet and Print. Tap on Add to Home Screen button. A crappy screengrab will automatically be added as your icon image and you’ll be asked to type in a name for your bookmark. We suggest keeping the name short and sweet. If you’re happy with your crappy screengrab icon, then congrats! You’re done. Have a nice day. Here’s a little trick on how to customize your bookmark icon. Create a 57×57 pixel PNG file of your, name it “apple-touch-icon.png” and then upload it to the root directory folder of your website. As long as this file is on your web server, then any iOS device (iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch) will use this image as its app icon. You of course will need FTP access to your web server in order to upload this PNG file. Feel free to forward this tutorial to your creative and IT teams if they have any questions. Also, here’s a layered TIF file that you can use as a template in Adobe Photoshop or GIMP (free) to make your 57×57 PNG bookmark icon. If your server admins won’t allow you to add the “apple-touch-icon.png” file to the root level of your web server, then you can ask them to add this line of code to your site template. This code will tell Apple iOS devices where they can find the bookmark image elsewhere on your server.

You may want to disable Push email temporarily for your email accounts to see if it improves battery life. Alternatively, if you use multiple email accounts then you may want to disable Push for email accounts where you don’t need to get an instant notification for new email, and switch to Fetch. The higher the fetch interval, the better it is for battery life, so you can set it appropriately based on the importance of the email account. OS’ smart multitasking feature lets apps fetch content in the background. Although Apple has made a lot of optimizations to ensure that battery consumption is minimal, it’s possible that poorly developed app can drain battery life due to this feature. Background App Refresh is a great feature, but you don’t need it for every app. I would strongly recommend turning it off for the Facebook app as it is known to drain battery life. Please note that the tips under section are to highlight areas where you could disable things that are not applicable to you so you can maximize battery life.

We are not recommending or advising you to disable features just for battery life, as then there would be no point in using smartphones like the iPhone. Swipe right from the edge of the Home screen or Lock screen to open Today View. You can add widgets to the Today View to get timely information from your favorite apps, however, they can drain battery life since they fetch data in the background to show up-to-date information. You should review the list and remove the widgets that you don’t want to ensure they don’t consume battery life unnecessarily as some of them could be using Location services. Swipe down from the top edge of the screen to access Notification Center. Then swipe to the left to access the Widget tab, scroll down and tap on Edit button. Tap on the red -button to remove the widget from the Notification Center. Dynamic wallpapers bring subtle animations to the Home and the Lock screen. Unfortunately, the animations take up CPU cycles and consume more battery. Choose Wallpaper where you can go to either Stills or your set an image from your photo library as your wallpaper.



Apple added a number of animations and physics-based effects to the interface in iOS 7 to help users understand the layered elements in the UI. Some of these effects even access gyroscopic data, which contributes further to battery drain. Reduce Motion and turn on the switch. Automatic Downloads section and turn off the “Updates” switch. While you’re there, you can also tell iOS to not use cellular data for automatic downloads and iTunes Match streaming. Spotlight searches a lot of types of content like Applications, Contacts, Music, Podcasts, Mails, Events etc., when you might use it only for contacts, applications, and music. Scroll down to the Include section to see the list of apps and tap on any of them to turn notifications off. Set Auto-Lock interval so that your iPhone will turn off more quickly after a period of inactivity. To set the auto-Lock interval, launch the Settings app, tap on General and then Auto-Lock and set the auto-lock interval to either 30 seconds, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 minutes.