Shortcut Creation

Roberto Di Statteo
Jul 4, 2021
3 min read

How to add a shortcut icon to your desktop or home screen

1 - Apple devices (all browsers) - medium difficulty, hi-res icon

2 - Apple devices (Safari only) - easy difficulty, lo-res icon

3 - PC (Chrome) - easy difficulty, lo-res icon (with medium difficulty hi-res icon instructions tacked on)

(Instructions for other platforms to be added)

1 - Apple devices (all browsers)

Open the "Shortcuts" app on your iPhone or iPad. If you can't find this or have removed it, check the App Store for "Shortcuts" and it'll be one of the first ones you see, with an icon like this:

Under the "My Shortcuts" heading, click "All Shortcuts" and then click the "+" icon which should be somewhere at the top of your screen
Select "Apps" from the menu (see pic)

Select your browser of choice (Chrome, in this example) Select "Open URLs [in Chrome]"
Type in the URL of the page you want to open (a site navigation map with a list of page URLs is currently being constructed but, in the meantime, we recommend https://toontalk.uk/forum)
Tap the 3 dots symbol next to "New Shortcut" at the top
Enter the name (whatever you want, but we recommend "Toontalk" for obvious reasons)
If you want to use a generic icon, click the icon next to the name you've just typed, and customise the colour and the glyph as instructed on screen
If you want to use our icon (or your own), click "Add to home screen", THEN click the icon, and choose what pic or photo you want to use. Here's a higher resolution version of our official icon for you to save to your device; if you want to use it, just click the download icon on the right of this box:

Hit "Add"

2 - Apple devices (Safari only)

If Safari is your browser of choice, there's actually a much easier way, however as of right now, we (who are still learning) can't figure out how not to make the icon blurry. However, if you don't care, and you want to do it more quickly, read on...

Go to Toontalk.uk
Go to whichever part of the site you want to appear first when clicking the icon (we recommend the Forum)
Click the "share" icon (the square with an "up" arrow in it) - this is at the top right on tablets and the bottom on phones
Click "Add to Home Screen" (see pic)

3. PC (Chrome)

The easy bit that you need to do to have a working shortcut:

Click the three dots icon in the top right of the browser window
Select "More tools" then "Create shortcut..." from the drop-down menu
Type in whatever you want the icon to be called (we recommend "Toontalk")

The slightly harder bit that you can choose to do if you want a better resolution icon:

Download this icon by clicking on the down arrow symbol on the right hand side.

If you don't already know where stuff downloads to, click the up arrow next to where it says "TT.ico" in the downloads bar at the bottom of your screen, just to check what directory it's in. Usually, this is C:\Users\[your username]\Downloads
Quit to your desktop and right-click on the Toontalk shortcut you created in the easy bit (above)
Click "Properties" and then "Change icon"
Hit "Browse" and select the icon file you just downloaded, then click "OK"
Click "Apply" if you want to test it first, or just click "OK" again if you trust that it's going to work and don't need to see a test first