Speeding up data entry through pickers and custom keyboards

Data entry is arguably the most mundane and uninteresting aspect of interface design. Regardless as to how you frame it, there is nothing sexy about users entering significant amounts of data.

That being said, exceptional implementation of data entry can be one of the most influential components in successful application design. While mobile computing has grown leaps and bounds in several short years, we still haven't overcome the difficulty that comes along with typing on a 3.5 inch screen.

While we can't increase the size of the keyboard, we can go about implementing pickers and alternative keyboards in order to help make data entry easier on our users. For this recipe, we'll go about discussing several data entry opportunities for our application.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we should prepare by taking note of the various types of data entry we plan to require from the user. We should also have the latest version documentation...