In programming, one of the most commonly accepted facts is that the flow of a program depends on the value of the various variables and properties you use. You just have to think how many times during an application development you have to check for your properties’ values, and based on them to drive the execution of the code to one or another way. Even more, think of how many times you need to check if an object has been added to an array, or if it has been removed from it. So, being aware of the changes that happen to the properties of your classes is a vital part of the programming process.
There are various ways that let us be notified when a property gets changed. For example, if you have a method to set a property’s value, or you just override a setter method, you can send a notification (NSNotification) to notify an observer about that change, and then perform the proper actions based on the value that was set. If you are familiarized with notifications, then using them would not be a problem at all if you would want to use them for being aware about changes in properties, but the truth is that doing so for a great number of properties would require to send and observe for a great number of notifications as well, and that could lead to a lot of extra code writing.
