Starting with Xcode 4.4 and 4.5, this behavior has been tweaked a bit. If you leave out the @synthesize declaration, as the click-to-code feature now does, the compiler just creates those methods for you anyway. At the same time, it creates an instance variable whose name is established by putting an underscore in front of the method name. In concrete terms, take a look at this line of code:@synthesize bigButton = _bigButton;In Xcode 4.4 and up, that line of code is now completely redundant. If your property declarations look just like that, you can leave them out entirely. Unless you really want to use a different naming convention for your instance variables, you should be able to skip the step of explicitly synthesizing accessors entirely.