The original code for the Cocoa frameworks came from the NeXTSTEP libraries Foundation and AppKit (those names are still used by Apple's Cocoa frameworks), and the NextStep engineers chose to prefix their symbols with NS.
Because Objective-C is an extension of C and thus doesn't have namespaces like in C++, symbols must be prefixed with a unique prefix so that they don't collide. This is particularly important for symbols defined in a framework.
If you are writing an application, such that your code is only likely ever to use your symbols, you don't have to worry about this. But if you're writing a framework or library for others' use, you should also prefix your symbols with a unique prefix. CocoaDev has a page where many developers in the Cocoa community have listed their "chosen" prefixes. You may also find this SO discussion helpful.
Three things are being declared here: an anonymous enumerated type is declared, ShapeType is being declared a typedef for that anonymous enumeration, and the three names kCircle, kRectangle, and kOblateSpheroid are being declared as integral constants.
Let's break that down. In the simplest case, an enumeration can be declared as
enum tagname { ... };
This declares an enumeration with the tag tagname. In C and Objective-C (but not C++), any references to this must be preceded with the enum keyword. For example:
enum tagname x; // declare x of type 'enum tagname'
tagname x; // ERROR in C/Objective-C, OK in C++
In order to avoid having to use the enum keyword everywhere, a typedef can be created:
enum tagname { ... };
typedef enum tagname tagname; // declare 'tagname' as a typedef for 'enum tagname'
This can be simplified into one line:
typedef enum tagname { ... } tagname; // declare both 'enum tagname' and 'tagname'
And finally, if we don't need to be able to use enum tagname with the enum keyword, we can make the enum anonymous and only declare it with the typedef name:
typedef enum { ... } tagname;
Now, in this case, we're declaring ShapeType to be a typedef'ed name of an anonymous enumeration. ShapeType is really just an integral type, and should only be used to declare variables which hold one of the values listed in the declaration (that is, one of kCircle, kRectangle, and kOblateSpheroid). You can assign a ShapeType variable another value by casting, though, so you have to be careful when reading enum values.
Finally, kCircle, kRectangle, and kOblateSpheroid are declared as integral constants in the global namespace. Since no specific values were specified, they get assigned to consecutive integers starting with 0, so kCircle is 0, kRectangle is 1, and kOblateSpheroid is 2.
Best Answer
As others have pointed out, there are many kinds of "null" under Cocoa/Objective C. But one further thing to note is that [title isKindOfClass:[NSNull class]] is pointlessly complex since [NSNull null] is documented to be a singleton so you can just check for pointer equality. See Topics for Cocoa: Using Null.
So a good test might be:
Note how you can use the fact that even if title is nil, title.length will return 0/nil/false, ie 0 in this case, so you do not have to special case it. This is something that people who are new to Objective C have trouble getting used to, especially coming form other languages where messages/method calls to nil crash.