Filling out forms in Safari on the iPhone is very slick... click on a field and up pops the keyboard, as well as a "Form Assistant", which contains "Next", ""Previous", and "Done" buttons. Type, next, type next, type next... quick and easy... not only can you quickly fill out each field, but the keyboard changes dynamically to accommodate the type of data for each field. In particular, if you tap next to land on a popup menu, the Picker UI appears in place of the keyboard, all seamlessly.
Now, as far as I can tell, there is no equivalent "Form Assistant" available ready-made in Cocoa Touch. So I'm planning to build my own and thinking thru the best approach. I've seen techniques that change the size of the parent view and scroll the field being edited so that it doesn't get stuck behind the keyboard... that seems like a good starting point for adding a Forms Assistant view to the bottom of the parent view, so that it appears above the keyboard. Next, the buttons will send messages to a controller to actually navigate between the fields. Finally, I'll need to define a popup field class, such that navigating to it brings up the picker UI in a sheet. The goal will be to make it behave very similarly to a text field such that navigating between text and popup fields displays either a keyboard or a picker UI in place.
More details to follow...
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