Objective-C autorelease memory management

Question

Im trying to understand when to call autorelease, and what this will actually do to my object.

After reading About Memory Management in the Mac Developer Library I under

Answer 1

An autoreleased object is added to an autorelease pool.

Objects in the autorelease pool are released at the end of an iteration of the main runloop (or sooner if you are managing your own autorelease pool and/or if you call drain).

When you call a method that returns an autoreleased object, it is pretty much guaranteed to stay valid until at least the end of the scope that it was called in.

If you want to ensure that it stays alive longer then you should retain it, remembering to release it again when you're finished with it.