Numberpad on iPhone
December 12, 2011 2:53 PM   RSS feed for this thread Subscribe

Number pad on iPhone "app"

Would it be possible to make the number pad come up when enterning numerical date (i.e. mileage, cost, etc)

Here is a screenshot when entering in fuelly, it is the usual number/symbol keyboard.
http://db.tt/H8iz8260

Here is a screenshot from my gasbuddy app showing the numberpad
http://db.tt/6T9lJuqP

I'm not sure if it has to be an actual app to do this or if you could somehow edit the html or css to denote a numberpad instead of the number/symbol keyboard.

Thanks!
posted by vr4Legacy to Fuelly Site Issues at 2:53 PM (8 comments total)

pb
Dec 12, 2011
2:55 PM

Yeah, only native apps have access to that keyboard. We can't do it from a web app, and I'm not sure we'd want to. You need to have a period to enter decimal places.

Just out of curiosity, how do you enter a decimal on gasbuddy?

vr4Legacy
Dec 12, 2011
3:03 PM

lol, yeah I just noticed the decimal is missing.... In gasbuddy it uses the last two digits as your cents and it natively adds the .009 marker (I've never seen a gas station that didn't price gas that way lol)

So if you enter 325, it will insert the decimal as 3.25

But I am fairly certain I have used other apps that have a decimal on the keypad, maybe gasbuddy edited it out. It's in the bottom left, where the blank spot is.

Nonetheless, it can't be done. Unless you guys want to roll out an actual app ;)

Thanks for the response though.


pb
Dec 12, 2011
4:11 PM

ahh ok, yeah, I can see how adding the decimal automatically should work for US prices. I think it'd be tougher for some other countries and odometer or tripometer readings.

I believe that keypad is called the telephone keypad for dialing numbers and having a decimal is not standard. (Some developers have hacked a decimal into that space, but there's no word on whether it was approved by Apple.)

After a little digging, I found that we can force the telephone keypad in a web app, but again, no decimal is a non-starter there. We have people all over the world using our mobile app, and we don't want to limit things. We could detect that you're in the US and serve it up, but switching between keypads for the various fields would end up being more confusing than helpful, I think.

vr4Legacy
Dec 12, 2011
5:25 PM

I see. It's actually a telephone keypad and as such doesn't have a decimal. Yeah, it wouldn't be much better to have to switch just to add the decimal. And I can understand not forcing the decimal.

Thanks for looking into it.

Daveydave
Dec 22, 2011
9:30 AM

It seems to work great when coming in on an Android phone. That actually surprised me, as I figured since it was a web app it wouldn't be able to dictate a keyboard version to use, but numerical here. Is it just the nature of the iProducts being locked down that it wouldn't work?


pb
Dec 22, 2011
10:12 AM

No, it's not that iProducts are locked down. The numeric keyboard works great on the iPhone. What vr4Legacy wanted was a specialized keyboard that includes numbers only. That is available to web apps on the iPhone, but we don't want to use it because there's no period on that special keyboard. So with that one you can't add a number with a decimal place.

We'll stick with the standard numeric keyboard. Glad to hear it works on Androids too.

Don't mean to drudge up an old topic but this is actually why I came to the forum today.

What about a separate field on each side of the decimal point?


pb
Jan 29
8:15 PM

nah, I think the extra taps required to move over to a separate field are worse than having a few extra keys on the keyboard.

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