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What is apple-touch-icon.png?

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apple-touch-icon.png from apple.comThe use of apple-touch-icon.png as defined by Apple is on the rise. This file is a small, square image that is primarily intended for bookmarking a web site on a mobile device.

The icon is used by the Apple iPhone OS and iPod touch software to add a web site shortcut to the Home screen. The benefit of creating an apple-touch-icon.png file is that the icon displayed for the site is defined by the web site owner rather than a thumbnail of the site content generated by the mobile device.

Aside from the benefit of a user-friendly icon, adding the icon can also clean up your web server logs. If you have HTTP status 404, file not found, entries in your access log:

visitor.example.com - - [01/Aug/2009:19:00:00 -0700] "GET /apple-touch-icon.png HTTP/1.1" 404 1024 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3"

Then it is likely that you have visitors that want to save your site on their mobile device.

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Category: software

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