Yesterday, I started wrestling with the concept of Page View Controllers in iOS. These are the swipeable sets of screens you've probably seen holding tutorials and "what the heck is this?" explanations for all those weird and trendy apps floating around. Frankly, I found it to be a massive pain in the butt, so I knocked together a little project to make things simpler.

Setting up your pages in Storyboard. No, this is nothing to do with Windows. Or the game Simon.

I imagine that most developers reach the Page View Controller the same way I did, as an afterthought in the development process, putting in a few helpful screens to inform users. I was hoping for a simple set of "page to" segues in Storyboard, but alas, it was not to be. I found myself having to create a separate UIPageViewController subclass, and implementing a datasource to handle loading all the UIViewControllers separately. Certainly more than a few minutes' design work.

So I sat down on the couch with the TV on for background and put together TEQuickPageViewController, a super-small library to move basic paging needs 100% into Storyboards. Just add your page view controller and view controllers to your Storyboard, give them appropriate classes and names, and you're done.

Granted, it's a quick and dirty method, and doesn't lend itself well to flexible views, but the use case I've got in mind is a developer who's been handed some designs for three our four views at most that would need to be paged. This project would make it easy to put the pages in within a few minutes or - even better - get the designer to set up the views.

I've submitted the first version to CocoaPods, so it's super easy to embed in your project and give it a try.