The fine folks at Tap! The iPhone & iPad magazine in the UK have just released a great new iPad app for delivering Tap! magazine to the UK and rest of the world. The new Tap! app takes advantage of all the power of an iPad application, with embedded product videos and spinnable product photos, and much, much more.
To build this most excellent app, they are using the standard developer iPad tools from Apple. One of the challenges they faced was that their managed corporate Macs are locked down, which makes it difficult to update to the latest iOS development tools as soon as Apple releases new versions, and both limits flexibility in the development process and slows the process down.
So, they are using VMware Fusion 4 and taking advantage of our great new feature of running OS X Lion in a virtual machine. By creating their iPad development environment in a OS X Lion virtual machine, they have the ability to quickly and easily modify their development environment as needed, while not compromising the stability, security and reliability of the corporate Macs.
They have created a production workflow where they use standard file sharing in the OS X Lion VM to make the iOS simulator folder available on the host Mac so designers to copy in their files for production from InDesign, Photoshop, and whatever other tools they need to create the iPad issue.
They can then compile and test the new issue in the iOS simulator and could push it to the App Store right from their iOS development OS X Lion virtual machine.
"VMware Fusion 4 gives us the flexibility we need to build our innovative iPad magazine that is actually itself created in the iPad simulator," says Christopher Phin, Tap!’s Editor. "It makes it easy to create a contained, easily managed and backed up development environment that we can have do everything we need to help make the best magazine app experience possible."
Deputy Art Editor Chris Hedley added: "Any concerns I had about performance and integration were completely laid to rest when I started using the Lion VM alongside my host OS; the VM runs beautifully and the integration is seamless."
If you want to get the most out of the latest apps and gadgets for your iPhone and iPad, we recommend checking out the Tap! magazine app in the App Store, and we are delighted that VMware Fusion 4 helped make it possible.
