I know this exists out there somewhere already, but I couldn’t find it anywhere and I was sick of writing it over and over again…. If someone knows of previous art, please point me in the right direction. I know Fiery Robot’s and Mike Ash’s, but they solve different problems.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to write a repeating NSTimer that doesn’t create a retain loop? Almost always you wind up with something like this:

[NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:1
                                 target:self
                               selector:@selector(something)
                               userInfo:nil 
                                repeats:YES];

Seems easy enough, except it’s a retain loop. Mike Ash does a nice job of explaining it and walking you through the hoops you need to avoid it. For such a common thing, you’d think this would be easy. And it should be, so I fixed it. I just still can’t quite believe I’m the first to do so.

Anyway, for your consideration I present a very simple class called RNTimer. Right now it just handles the most common case: a repeating timer that does not generate a retain loop and automatically invalidates when it is released. It could of course be expanded to handle more NSTimer functionality if there is interest. Let me know if you have a use case that the current implementation doesn’t address.

You may find it along with further information at GitHub.