There have been various widget-making (i.e. Web Runtime shortcuts, in this case) systems tried out, but AppMe is possibly the easiest so far. Find a mobile-friendly web site you want to go to often (for example, something you'd normally set a bookmark in Web for....), paste its address into the AppMe wizard, choose an icon, and you're halfway there already. Read on for links and a walk-through. The end result: web sites on your menu or homescreen, properly labelled (on the menu) and with the icons of your choice.

The developer, Ludger A. Rinsche, introduces AppMe on his web page as:

"AppMe fills a gap in the Symbian OS. Even the newest iteration has not the possibility to add web bookmarks like an App to the startmenu or the homescreen.

With AppMe you can easily create an App which opens the desired web page. You can also modify the icon to make your App even more tailored."

Here's an example of using AppMe, which seems to be free, albeit with the occasional inneractive ad showing up. The use case is a mobile-friendly or mobile-aware web site (in this case I plucked Transport for London, http://tfl.gov.uk/ from my 3-Lib mobile-friendly Web Guide) that you want to have represented on your main Symbian menu or homescreen.

Here's the AppMe start page:

The wizard has a simple interface and there are only a couple of steps. Set up a suitable title and paste in the address of the page you want to go to. This could equally well be a blog or media gallery. Or anything that you'd normally set up as a bookmark in Web.

Then pick (or upload) an icon. Anything's better than the generic Web icon you currently get if you want to put a Web bookmark on a Symbian homescreen, plus you'll have the benefit of the text label too.

Then it's 'create' and then download time, you'll end up with a tiny .wgz widget, around 20kb in size, and you can Bluetooth this over to your phone for installation in the usual way.

Here's what my trivial example widget looks like on the menu, on a homescreen, and when started.

In use, the use of a widget rather than a direct Web bookmark is a little clumsy, since you go from the menu/homescreen to a Web loading screen/furniture and only then to the actual target web site, but it's still faster than launching Web manually and scrolling to the right bookmark.

The widgets apparently work on S60 3rd Edition FP1 and FP2 phones as well as the newer touchscreen ones, so there's no excuse not to have a crack at this yourself.

AppMe is an excellent new free resource that fills a definite niche in terms of menu and homescreen customisation. Do please give feedback (via the 'Feedback' tab on the left of AppMe's main screens) to the developer on how you'd like this to get extended, consider the current version very definitely a 'v1.0'....

Steve Litchfield, AAS, 4 Feb 2011

PS. The developer has also put up a quick demo video of AppMe in action - MAKE SURE YOU TURN DOWN YOUR SPEAKERS before watching - the soundtrack music is VERY loud!