Hackszine.com: iPhone WebClip speed dial

iPhone WebClip speed dial

Nate True figured out a quick way to add speed dial icons to your iPhone 1.1.3 home screen:

So the new iPhone 1.1.3 firmware allows you to put icons on your home screen for websites, but I know many of us want to put phone numbers on there for a Speed Dial screen.
I've put a little hack together that lets you have a (somewhat) speedy speed dial icon. There's no jailbreaking required for this one - it can all be done using Apple-approved Web Clip creation.

The difficulty is that it's not as easy as loading a tel://[phone_number] URL in Safari and then adding a bookmark to the home screen. When you cancel the call, the URL displayed in Safari returns to the previous item in the browser's history. Nate's hack is to use a data: URI to redirect to the tel: address. When you cancel the call to add the bookmark, the browser returns to the data: address and you can bookmark that. Since it does an immediate redirect, clicking the link on your home screen will immediately trigger the call dialog.

If you wanted to type the whole thing in, you'd essentially enter something like this in the address bar (all on one line):

data:text/html,<html><head><meta http-equiv='refresh' content='0;url=tel://12345'/></head></html>

Thankfully, Nate put together a page that will do the dirty work for you and generate the appropriate data URI for bookmarking. Just point your iPhone's Safari address to http://[phonenumber].tel.qlnk.net, then cancel the call and bookmark the resulting link.

For step-by-step photo instructions and info on using a different icon for the speed dial button, just follow the link.

iPhone 1.1.3 Speed Dial on your home screen - Link

Posted by Jason Striegel | Feb 20, 2008 08:26 PM
iPhone | Permalink | Comments (0)