Word Virus

If you’re like me, you hate the way that the iPhone makes icons for WebClips.  When you save a bookmark to your Home Screen, you want it to either match your theme, or at least not look like a silly small version of the web site.  Here’s a trick for Jailbreak and non-Jailbreak users to take control over those icons (screen grabs coming in later post).

Some sites are nice enough to provide a custom icon for iPhone users, but if you’re on a site that doesn’t, and don’t want the ugly, here’s a web page looking icon, follow these steps:

1. Find an image on the page you like, maybe the logo.
2. Zoom in on this image so that it fills most of the screen.
3. Click the + to open up the bookmark screen.
4. Simply click Add to Home Screen button.
5. You will be presented with the new icon, of the image you selected.

If you’re running on a Jailbreak phone, you can do the same thing.  However, you have even more control.  I have a certain theme that I use for everything on the iPhone, and I want my WebClip icons to look like this theme.  Open up an SFTP client, and go to:

/var/private/mobile/Library/WebClips

You will find directories for all your WebClips.  Go into each one, and look at the icon.png file until you find the one you want to change.  Create the icon you want, and upload it to the directory.  It’s that easy.

The iPhone 2.0 firmware currently does not support the Overlay trick.  If you are still running a 1.X firmware, you create custom overlay PNG files to create WebClip icons to fit your theme.  Look in the Applications -> MobileSafari.app directory to see examples.