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I've building a very basic iphone app where the user will be able to enter or select a very large numeric cash value (usually in the thousands or millions).

At the moment I am using a simple text box entry with number pad selected.

I am going to use the example of a Football transfer fee as an analogy.

A transfer fee can be in many millions and I really do not want the user to be mis-typing zero's, or getting frustrated with the number of zero's they have to enter.

In addition, as the text box/numeric cash value is not displayed with any currency formatting it makes it very unintuitive to know just how much you are entering.

In this thread I have a way of displaying big numbers on the screen; you'll also notice the numbers are formatted in chunks (ie: 2.25m, 2m, 7.25m, etc) -- it makes the process more streamlined and is more visually intuitive.

But what I am unsure about is how to make it easy for the user to enter big numbers without typing stupidly long zeros every time.

Possible solution 1 -- Use a UIPickerView with 3+ segments for each of the units. Problem -- it won't handle smaller numbers properly, also you may get weird looking numbers like 1.15k which although correct is not what I want to display.

Possible solution 2 -- Use a +/- button to allow a user to simply increase/decrease the number by a factor of 250 or 500. This is the simplest answer, but its not as elegant as a UIPickerView

If there is another way to do this, a way to simplify the input of big numeric numbers from a user, I'd be interested.

Community
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zardon
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You could add formatted output right above or below the text field. As they enter numbers, update the formatted field adding currency symbols, commas and decimals. Not the most elegant way to do this, but it would be simple to implement, and intuitive to the user.

Jordan Mack
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  • I've been looking at how sports games handle this, and the majority of them have a +/- button either side of a text label displaying how much has been entered. Other's have a separate page with all the numbers on it. I think the +/- button idea is perhaps the best way around my problem for the moment. There might be a more elegant way though. – zardon Nov 06 '10 at 06:00