Memory Management - who's right?

[The Grand Poohbah]

The following two examples are from the 20 Jan 2009 Cocoa-dev Digest. The first example is from the iPhone Dev SDK book. The second is a different approach that the author (mmalc) says is better. Who is right? And why?

Message: 13
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:50:48 -0800
From: mmalc Crawford <mmalc_lists@me.com>
Subject: Re: Accessing interface elements (iPhone vs Mac)
To: Ashley Perrien <perrien@earthlink.net>
Cc: cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com
Message-ID: <C7B58E0F-CB42-477A-A790-30BF7F462709@me.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes


On Jan 20, 2009, at 12:41 PM, Ashley Perrien wrote:

... (Ashley Perrien writes) ...
In iPhone examples many or all of them have:

@interface myViewController : UIViewController
{
*****IBOutlet UILabel *myLabel;
}
@property (retain, nonatomic) UILabel *myLabel;
and then @synthesize myLabel in the implementation. I've even seen *
where the dealloc method will then release the object.

... (mmalc replies)...
This should actually be

@interface MyViewController : UIViewController
{
****UILabel *myLabel;
}
@property (retain, nonatomic) IBOutlet UILabel *myLabel;

The advantage of this approach is that it makes the memory management *
semantics explicit and clear, and it works consistently across all *
platforms for all nib files.

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/61838>

<Resource Programming Guide: Loading Nib Files Programmatically

[DevTeamOfOne]

I was always led to believe there was no difference.

[ambiensignal]

http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/ip...-iboutlet.html

[PhoneyDeveloper]

Do see my comments on that other thread.

malc works for apple as some kind of evangelist and he posts to cocoa-dev and to the apple iPhone forum. His opinions on this subject are pedantic. I don't agree with all of his opinions . However, all other things being equal it's better to put the IBOutlet token on the property.

This is unfortunately a somewhat misunderstood topic and there are plenty of examples that are incorrect.