Re: strange crasher that puzzles me

[hns]

> Are there any easy rules of thumb to follow, any good documentation about
> memory-management in objective-c for the "beginner" like me?

Yes:
1. only +alloc, +copy, +mutableCopy, +new return objects that you must
release/autorelease explicitly (unless you want to keep it until
application exit, e.g. a global object).
2. all (well, 99,5%) other methods (convenience allocators, getters,
transformers, ...) do not need to be released (unless see below)
3. init does not change anything
4. if you retain you must also release/autorelease explicitly later
5. you must retain if you want that the pointer is valid until after
beyond the end of your current method
6. release does invalidate a pointer immediately, autorelease allows
you to still use the pointer until you return from your current method
(but not beyond that point)

That's it. Should be a big popup in every Obj-C development tool :-)

So:

1. {
localPtr=[class alloc/copy/new];
...
[localPtr (auto)release];
}

2. {
localPtr=[obj method];
...
### no release ###
}

3. {
extPtr=[obj retain];
}
...
{
[extPtr (auto)release];
}

extPtr is instance variable or global variable.

if 1+3 are combined the release/retain is not required.
Nikolaus