When the fifth version of iOS (iOS 5) was released to the public, it introduced a brand new, revolutionary approach to the way the interface of an application was designed. That was the use of storyboards, and it was meant to change the existing designing philosophy from the ground up. Before iOS 5, each view controller had almost always an accompanying Interface Builder file, known as nib or xib, and the idea was simple: The interface of each view controller was supposed to be designed in the respective nib file, whereas all the nibs together were composing the full interface of the application. From one hand, that was handy because developers could only focus on the interface they were designing at the time, but on the other side, too much files were eventually had to be created, and even more, developers could not have a whole overview of the app’s interface.
With storyboards all that became just history, as this new way has been used by almost the entire developer community. Storyboards had (and have) to offer three significant advantages compared to the old-fashioned technique:
- The whole interface design takes place in just one file. The total number of the files in a project is dramatically reduced, especially in big-sized ones. Using extra nib files is optional and is allowed for creating auxiliary views only.
- Developers have at their disposal an instant overview of the app’s interface and flow.
- The transitions between the view controllers (named scenes in terms of the interface design) and how they happen are now perfectly defined and clearly presented to developers.
From all the above, the transitions between scenes consist of a special chapter of the storyboards, and they’re mostly known as segues.
A segue is closely related to the navigation and handling of an application, as it actually defines the transitioning details when moving from one view controller to another. These details specify whether animation should be applied or not, what kind of animation, and of course, the preparation and performance of the actual transition. But not just that. A segue can also be used to pass data to the view controller that’s about to be shown, and that’s a common case scenario for almost all developers.
