*Distinction between calling [self.property release] and self.property = nil

:The latter will allow you to assign the variable later and should generally be used when you want to "clear" a variable for memory saving purposes but will have a need to assign a value to it again sometime in the future. <tt>release</tt> will completely invalidate the object and attempting to call ''anything'' on it afterwards will result in a EXC_BAD_ACCESS error every time. What does this mean in the grand scheme of things? You will most likely use <tt>release</tt> in only one place in your code – the object's <tt>dealloc</tt> method.