Decimal keypad in iPhone SDK – Well Done Apple!

A few days ago I was trying to find how to get a decimal point in the number pad for an app I was writing. Having reviewed a number of discussions on the subject which suggested subclassing the keypad or adding extra buttons and all sorts of scary things, I finally resorted to the manual.

In the list of available keypad types, it turns out that there is actually a new one in SDK 4.1. Unfortunately, at present, they haven’t updated Interface Builder with the new values, so you can’t select the new values directly but you can programatically, like this:

textField.keyboardType = UIKeyboardTypeNumberPad;

so clearly they have listened to the needs expressed in these various articles, but unfortunately, this is rather well hidden in the documentation, and until it appears in the keyboard type picklist in Interface Builder, will remain so.

So well done Apple for adding UIKeyboardTypeNumberPad, but please can you add it to Interface Builder too!