Found nil while setting UILabel? Swift

Hello,

In my App Delegate I have this code.

 func applicationDidBecomeActive(application: UIApplication) {

   var unacknowledgedNotifs:Int = application.applicationIconBadgeNumber application.applicationIconBadgeNumber = 0
       if unacknowledgedNotifs >= 1 {
            viewController.checkForNewRiddle()

       }

Im using this method to check for a notification badge and if there is one then i want to update a label in my viewController. So i call the method viewController.checkForRiddle() which is a function in my View controller that changes the label.

However, when i run this the app crashes, specifically when setting that label. It crashes with: fatal error: unexpectedly found nil while unwrapping an Optional value...

I've been playing around with different ideas and none of them seem to fix this issue. I thought the issue is most likely because the view hadn't loaded yet but when i was playing around I did println() in viewDidLoad, didFinishLaunching and didBecomeActive and found that actually the viewDidLoad was called first. Hence the complete confusion...

So my conclusion that the view not being loaded yet caused the crash must be false if that println statement came first.

I hope this makes some sense to someone and any help would be greatly appreciated. Been stuck on this for hours :|

Cheers.