Question about naming conventions for Cocoa/Objective-C for iPhone (with respect to release and autorelease)

Question

Can you describe the naming convention difference between a method that returns an object it has allocated for the caller (and that the caller should release), and a method that returns an autorelease object?

Answer 1

Methods that return a retained object (which the caller should release) should include the word copy, new, mutableCopy, or alloc (as in an alloc/init pair). Everything else should return an autoreleased object.