How to Create SMS Ballon iPhone Table View

I was working on incorporating an "sms ballon" type view for a client and while doing some research on the best, and different, ways to implement the functionality I came across a great tutorial, but thought it could be cleaned up just a little bit which should make your FPS increase and I fixed some memory leaks.  I wasn't able to run any performance tests on it so I would welcome ANY feedback how to improve the code.

The key to making the "ballon" background grow and shrink based upon the amount of text is using:

UIImage *balloon = [[UIImage imageNamed:self.imgName] stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:24 topCapHeight:15];

If someone has any advice on how to make the font look better please let me know.