The only thing that surprised me was the reference cycle in NSAssert. Then again, given Apple's poor regard for TDD, that shouldn't surprise me.
Everyone except the authors of the "Blocks Programming Topics" and the authors of the AVCamCaptureManager sample code. Maybe.
FYI the reason I included the digression about the __block change specifically is that I was recently fixing bugs on a project that uses AVCamCaptureManager, and Apple's mis-use of __block in that class, this is not a joke, through a series of corner cases, caused the status bar to unexpectedly and nondeterminisitically change color about 5% of the time on an unrelated screen.
Saying "everybody should already know how to do weak references" is great in theory. But if you are fielding weird reports for unreproducible status bar issues and it occurs to you at any time in the first hour that maybe Jim from the next cubicle used buggy sample code for a video recording feature on another screen you are a WAY better software developer than I am.
Of course this is standard stuff. But unlike a lot of standard stuff, this one can go undetected for long periods, and crop up in very unexpected places. That's the problem.
No - it's just that these documents/samples haven't been updated when they should have been. Have you filed a Radar?
I have radars open on both of these issues (and a large quantity of other things referenced in this post). They remain open for long periods of time without acknowledgment, as is tradition.
For me, I agree this is standard stuff. If you are writing this stuff everyday, this block song and dance is basically taken care of with muscle memory.
Part of my job involves working with people from other companies who aren't as strong with objective-c. There are a lot of people that have trouble blocks for whatever reasons. I recently had a guy from another company act almost surprised that we were using "advanced features like blocks". We were a little shocked. But it just shows that not everyone is comfortable with them.
BUT, I think a better approach from the author wouldn't be to tell people not to use blocks w/ NSNotificationCenter but to make sure they know the in and outs of blocks, because blocks are amazingly powerful tools and they aren't going anywhere.
The NSAssert macro caught me by surprise too.
libextobj is great.
So it can introduce reference cycles that only exist in debug mode, that prevent you from spotting premature deallocations that only become apparent in release mode.
(Of course, you QA in release mode. But it's annoying not catching that stuff early)
A hack to get around the self inside the macro https://github.com/seivan/SHAlertViewBlocks/blob/develop/Exa...