jQuery Dialog Input Focus

I'm a big believer in setting keyboard focus to the proper input. As a long-time laptop user, I avoid using the mouse wherever possible. It simply slows me down. Save the mice!

Using jQuery UI's dialog to pop up a form, I could not do this for some reason. Here is my code to set input focus in a dialog.

// In event handler
$('#mydialog').open();
$('#myinput').get(0).focus();

And nothing! I tried with many dialog options, and the only thing I could do to make it work, was to eliminate the dialog.

The only thing I can figure is that the dialog itself is setting focus, or blurring my focus. So I fixed this by delaying the focus call using a timer.

// In event handler
$('#mydialog').open();
setTimeout("$('#myinput').get(0).focus();", 500);

Note, times less than 200 ms were not reliable.