This has implications on the way I interact with my modal controllers. When I first started out in iOS development, I assumed that UIViewController did not retain the modally presented view. Well, really it was more like I had no reason to assume it did retain them. This left me with fairly awkward attempts at releasing them when I knew they would have finished their dismissal animations:
_myViewController = [[UIViewController alloc] init];
[self. present modalViewController:_myViewController animated:YES];
/*
Some stuff, then in a different method all together,
probably as the result of a delegate callback or something...
*/
[self dismissModalViewControllerAnimiated:YES];
[_myViewController performSelector:@selector(release) withObject:nil afterDelay:0.5f];
Then, I saw the modalViewController property of UIViewController and thought, "Man, I hope it retains that property when a modal view controller is presented." Sure enough, I logged the retain count on several of these attempts and noticed a general increase immediate after the call to presentModalViewController:animated: (I know, retain counts are not a perfect metric). So, somewhere along the line, I have started using a much nicer pattern where I assume that any controller object I present modally is retained by the presenting controller. This lets me write the standard present code:
UIViewController* myViewController = [[UIViewController alloc] init];
[self presentModalViewController:myViewController animated:YES];
[myViewController release]; // <- Fire and forget!
Now, of course, there is no awkwardness: no need to wait for an animation to finish, or even keep a reference to the presented controller if I don't need it. I can blindly dismiss it later and not worry about leaking. I like it.
I have logged many a dealloc in my modally presented controllers a