How to let the user know that pages can be turned when using UIPageViewController?

Question

I just implemented a view in my iPhone app using UIPageViewController. The page turning looks really spiffy. But how do I let the user know that the page can or needs to be turned to get more content? I couldn't find anything in the reference manual.

One other wrinkle is some of my pages are larger than a single screen, so users are already scrolling up and down to get at more content. Thanks.

Answer 1

The best way to show the user that something can be moved is for the programmer to move it when it first appears. For instance, if a have something that's a table but doesn't look like one, I scroll it to the end before I display it, then display it and scroll it back to the top as soon as it appears. This has two effects: 1) your app looks slicker because there's some animation going on - the eye is attracted to movement 2) the user can see that there's more there because they watch it all scroll by.

So I'd recommend turning to the second page at startup and turning back programmatically when it first appears. The user sees your clever animation right away without having to stumble on it himself, and he knows it can work that way.

Answer 2

Not entirely serious, but food for thought:

Source: Khoi Vinh

Answer 3

The answer from @Owen Hartnett seems to be the right one, which is why I marked it as the best. However, I'm still climbing up the steep iOS learning curve and I didn't want to take on learning how to create animations as well. So here is the solution/hack that I came up with.

I created a "cover" or first page for the view. I built and loaded the app into the simulator. I used my mouse to turn up the bottom right corner and took a screen shot. I then cropped the screen shot and added that image to the cover page that I created. I had to fiddle a little bit, because the gesture recognizer didn't seem to like having the entire screen be a PNG file. When I made the image a bit smaller, it worked.