Cocoa app delegate

Programming with the Cocoa APIs has been a very strange experience for me. My first experience was on the iPhone with Cocoa Touch, and right when I had sort-of figured that out, I had to switch to OS X development.
Yesterday, I figured out how to badge dock icons. I found the appropriate documentation, but I still didn't understand, so I downloaded the sample project. Now I had proof of existance, but couldn't see how it was working. Finally, I opened the nib, and saw that the AppDelegate class was connected via Interface Builder as the NSApplication's delegate, and thus its delegate functions were called as appropriate.
I cannot figure out how to achieve this same goal programmatically, so I copied their method, and it does indeed work.

EDIT: the following is untested, but seems like it should work:
Create an instance of the delegate class, and in its -awakeFromNib method, insert the follwing code:
[NSApp setDelegate:self];

the end.