release/autorelease confusion in cocoa for iphone

Question

I\'m slowly teaching myself cocoa for the iPhone(through the Stanford Class on iTunes U) and I\'ve just gone through the part on memory management, and I wanted to hopefully

Answer 1

About firstName/lastName.

You should always, for clarity, remember to specify the properties' attributes. The setter default attribute is assign, in this case you want to use retain.

@interface Person : NSObject
{
    NSString *firstName;
}
@property (retain) NSString *firstName;
@end

With retain each and only time you use the dot notation to assign a value the compiler inserts a retain: just remember to always use it. For consistency I advice you to write your initializer this way:

- (id) initWithFirstName:(NSString*) aString
{
    self.firstName = aString; 
}

and the dealloc method this way:

- (void) dealloc
{
     self.firstName = nil;
}

About @""-type objects. They are constant NSStrings objects. Just use them as the were (they are) NSString objects and never release them. The compiler takes care of them.