Hi Seth,
Regarding no. 2: We are currently working on having this as an out-of-the-box STV feature that will automatically handle all of these details for you. The final implementation should give you something very similar to how the contacts application behaves when the edit button is tapped. We're pushing really hard for this to be available in our new STV 2.0 release, due in about a week (but may be delayed a bit).
If you need this urgently and would like to go about doing it manually, please refer to the following post:
www.sensiblecocoa.com/forum/sensible-tab...leviewmodel.html#406 . (please note that the solution in the post is a very simplistic one, where our out-of-the-box solution will probably be much more involved than this)