Note: This is one of the limitations of storyboards. With nibs you always had a reference to the App Delegate in your MainWindow.xib and you could make connections from your top-level view controllers to outlets on the App Delegate. That is currently not possible with storyboards. You cannot make references to the app delegate from your top-level view controllers. That’s unfortunate, but you can always get those references programmatically, which is what you do here