This calculates the number of days of a year of a given date:
NSDate *someDate = [NSDate date];
NSDate *beginningOfYear;
NSTimeInterval lengthOfYear;
NSCalendar *gregorian = [[NSCalendar alloc] initWithCalendarIdentifier:NSGregorianCalendar];
[gregorian rangeOfUnit:NSYearCalendarUnit
startDate:&beginningOfYear
interval:&lengthOfYear
forDate:someDate];
NSDate *nextYear = [beginningOfYear dateByAddingTimeInterval:lengthOfYear];
NSInteger startDay = [gregorian ordinalityOfUnit:NSDayCalendarUnit
inUnit:NSEraCalendarUnit
forDate:beginningOfYear];
NSInteger endDay = [gregorian ordinalityOfUnit:NSDayCalendarUnit
inUnit:NSEraCalendarUnit
forDate:nextYear];
NSInteger daysInYear = endDay - startDay;
Sad caveat: This does not work correctly for year 1582.
The year 1582, the year when Gregor introduced the currently widespread used calendar, needed a fix to align solar with calendar years. So they went with the pragmatic solution: They just dropped October 5-14. (They were not crazy enough to change weekdays, too). As a result the year 1582 only has 355 days.
Addendum: The code above only works correctly for years after 1582. It returns 365 days for the year 1500, for example, even though this year was a leap year in the then used julian calendar. The gregorian calendar starts at October 15, 1582. Computations made on the gregorian calendar are just not defined before that date. So in this way Apple's implementation is correct. I'm not aware of a correct implementation for years before 1583 on Cocoa.