Question

As I’m pretty new to Objective-C and memory management, I was curious if this code was ok –

First of all, code to return a UIImageView –

-(UIImageView *)somethingAnimation {

UIImageView *something = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"Something.png"]];
something.frame = CGRectMake(-100, -100, kSomethingWidth, kSomethingHeight);

return something; // released later by the Swarmer object

}

Then the code which calls it, where UIImageView *something is declared in the interface then this is in the implementation –

something = [controller somethingAnimation];

and later –

[something release];

Is this correctly releasing everything? Seems to work without memory or crashing issues. Many thanks for any help.

Answer 1

The Memory Management Programming Guide defines a set of naming conventions that determines whether a method should return an “owned” object or an autoreleased one. According to these conventions, a method named -somethingAnimation should definitely return an autoreleased object. So in your case, you should be returning [something autorelease] instead, and then not releasing it later.