Reference counting really isn't that hard to follow. Cocoa's conventions are pretty straightforward. You need to release (or autorelease -- which by the way is

Reference counting really isn't that hard to follow. Cocoa's conventions are pretty straightforward. You need to release (or autorelease -- which by the way is great) for every call to alloc, retain, copy (inc. fooCopy), or new (inc. newFoo). Everything else is autoreleased. Exceptions are documented.