iPhone 5 Portable Genius

Working with Passes

You’ve probably had the experience of walking into your favorite coffee shop or a movie theater, remembering that you have a loyalty card, gift card, or coupon, and then fumbling around to find it in your purse or wallet. Or, worse, you forget you have a card or you leave it at home, so you miss out.

Many merchants are feeling your pain and are doing something about it by creating iOS apps that include gift cards, loyalty cards, coupons, special offers, freebies, and even train or plane boarding passes. These app items usually include bar codes or QR codes, so once you arrive at the destination, the merchant offers a scanner that you can use to scan the code and redeem your card, check in, or whatever. These are great because as long as you have your iPhone (and I know you always have your iPhone), you have your cards and passes.

Of course, you still have to fumble about a bit to locate the app, use the app’s interface to locate the card or pass, and then place your iPhone into the scanner. And, unfortunately, having the card or pass on your iPhone doesn’t guarantee that you’ll remember to scan it.

iOS 6 aims to solve all these problems by offering a new app called Passbook that acts as a kind of digital wallet to store all the gift cards, loyalty cards, coupons, tickets, special offers, and boarding passes that you’ve accumulated through your apps (see Figure 10.20).

10.20 The Passbook app is the new home for all your cards, coupons, tickets, and passes. ...