Show the UITableView textField cell above the Keyboard when typing

Scenario:

Keyboard

iPhone On-Screen Keyboard Rundown

As I started building the latest Consumetrics iPhone app over the weekend, I had to choose which keyboard style to use for some input fields like name, email, and so on. These fields live in a “settings table” (really just a grouped table with input fields on it), so picking keyboards in Interface Builder is out of the question, unfortunately, since I require some pretty customized cells. Naturally, I checked the documentation first, where I was confronted by this plethora of options:

typedef enum {
        UIKeyboardTypeDefault,
        UIKeyboardTypeASCIICapable,
        UIKeyboardTypeNumbersAndPunctuation,
        UIKeyboardTypeURL,
        UIKeyboardTypeNumberPad,
        UIKeyboardTypePhonePad,
        UIKeyboardTypeNamePhonePad,
        UIKeyboardTypeEmailAddress,
        UIKeyboardTypeAlphabet = UIKeyboardTypeASCIICapable
    } UIKeyboardType;

Good grief. Seven distinct keyboard types? Bah. (Yes, 9 appear in the list, but UIKeyboardTypeDefault and UIKeyboardTypeAlphabet are just aliases for other types. Quiet you.) Some choices were obvious — my email address field will probably use UIKeyboardTypeEmailAddress, for instance — but some other choices are kind of head-scratchers. One of the fields wants a quantity, for example. Which keyboard should I use for that bad boy? UIKeyboardTypeNumberPad? But what if I need units, like “cups”? Can I get an alphabetic keyboard from UIKeyboardTypeNumberPad? I didn’t know, and tragically neither does Google; there aren’t any good breakdowns of iPhone keyboard types on the first few pages. Hitting up some blogs finally pointed me to some more Apple documentation, but even that still didn’t answer all my questions.
After not finding what I need, I did what any good developer would do: put down what I was supposed to be doing, and pick up something more interesting. I slapped together a quick iPhone app to display each keyboard type through a table view, the source for which is attached, and used it to scribble down a quick reference, which follows forthwith:
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