When you have two objects A and B, say two view controllers, that you want to have talk to each other, you can choose from the following options:
-
NSNotificationCenter. This is anonymous one-to-many communication. Object A posts a notification to the NSNotificationCenter, which then distributes it to any other objects listening for that notification, including Object B. A and B do not have to know anything about each other, so this is a very loose coupling. Maybe a little too loose...
-
KVO (Key-Value Observing). One object observes the properties of another. This is a very tight coupling, because Object B is now peeking directly into Object A. The advantage of KVO is that Object A doesn't have to be aware of this at all, and therefore does not need to send out any notifications -- the KVO mechanism takes care of this behind the scenes.
-
Direct pointers. Object A has a pointer to Object B and directly sends it messages when something of interest h