iPhone application development can be very different from creating applications that will run on servers with lots of storage.
iPhone 4, as an example, packs a whopping 512MB of total memory, which is great for a smart phone. But earlier models included just 128MB and, as a best practice, your iPhone application should not use more than 46MB.
To make things even more complicated, automatic memory management, which is often called "garbage collection" in development jargon, is not available in the iPhone SDK. So, as developers, we need to use reference counting or other techniques to track how we are using storage resources.
For those unfamiliar with reference counting, Wikipedia defines it as "a technique of storing the number of references, pointers, or handles to a resource such as an object, block of memory, disk space or other resource."
This may sound complicated at first, but in practice using a technique like reference counting simply means that each time we manually create an object using "alloc," we need to release the object later.
In this video tutorial, I'll describe release and autorelease, two methods of freeing objects from memory.
