The ridiculous amount of effort that we have to go through to define private properties (just sheer amount of text around them) makes me miss the pre-property days... I still define iVars the old fashioned way. The whole language would do well to have some syntax sugar added akin to Java's private, public, protected for properties so we could just go

@private NSString dog;

@public NSString cat;

... Oh Wait! We do, it's just that nobody uses it anymore. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869935/objective-c-priva...

Well we have syntax sugar for iVars... I think it's so messy putting some properties in the header and some in the implementation file with a private category - come on we can't have better syntax than that?