I'm was playing around with the standard sample split view that gets created when you select a split view application in Xcode, and after adding a few fields i needed to add a few fields to display them in the detail view. and something interesting happend in the original sample, the master view sets a "detailItem" property in the detail view and the detail view displays it. - (void)setDetailItem:(id) newDetailItem { if (_detailItem != newDetailItem) { _detailItem = newDetailItem; // Update the view. [self configureView]; } i understand what that does and all, so while i was playing around with it. i thought it would be the same if instead of _detailItem i used self.detailItem, since it's a property of the class. however, when i used self.detailItem != newDetailItem i actually got stuck in a loop where this method is constantly called and i cant do anything else in the simulator. my question is, whats the actual difference between the underscore variables(ivar?) and the properties? i read some posts here it seems to be just some objective C convention, but it actually made some difference.