Modern Objective-C Language Features

Objective-C was quite verbose and lack of visual clue, however after Clang 3.5, there are quite a few improvements, these new language features allow us to write more clean code:

The “new” method

[Foo new]

is better than

[[Foo alloc] init]

if you don’t need to use custom init methods.

Object Subscripting

array[i]
dictionary[key]

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are better then

[array objectAtIndex:i]
[dictionary objectForKey:key]

since they has more visual clues.

Primitive Literals

 NSNumber *fortyTwo = @42;

is bettern then

 [NSNumber numberWithInt:42]

since the syntax is consistent across int string char bool and enum types.

Container Literals

NSArray *array = @[ @"Hello", NSApp, @(i) ];
NSDictionary *dictionary = @{
    @"name" : NSUserName(),
    @"date" : [NSDate date],
    @"processInfo" : [NSProcessInfo processInfo]
};

Are better then the good old constructors.

By using these new language features, we would experience less cognitive load during programming.