Apple Pass Designer

What do people find interesting about this? This doesn’t seem at all significant to me

There are free, web-based wizards to create PKPass-format Apple Wallet passes. This one was posted on HN a few months ago.

https://walletwallet.alen.ro/

The one thing I hope Apple has added to the pass framework is the ability to semantically define a barcode area.

This would enable them to finally have Wallet show ONLY that rectangle at a suddenly blinding brightness level (on HDR displays) for the scanner, rather than cranking up the entire screen.

When I worked at Apple a dozen years ago I pushed hard for this to be built. We were using our own slap dash solution, but we wanted something everybody could use.

Better late than never!

Haha this is bizzarely specific to my back-of-the woods brain. Feels like something that would be super relevant to someone in San Francisco but not as much to me

Even though they call it pass, this can really be used for a ton of things. Neat addition to the ecosystem, I never would have thought of putting it in the hands of normal users.

> Pass Designer beta requires macOS 27 or later

Interesting if this is due to concrete reason or not.

Also worth mentioning that they added an easy way to make passes directly in the wallet app on iOS 27, you can basically scan in existing barcodes and qr codes.

I've lurked about PKPASS[1] file format a little bit, sounds like any vibecoder can make editor of those files, but maybe I am missing something (verification?)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKPASS

Would love to see a generative AI tool that can integrate the QR/barcode into the artwork itself. Maybe in the next version… Maybe someone could vibe code that.

Does it run on non-Apple devices also? If not...

anyone not on ios 27 — i can recommend an app called “offline cards.” straightforward, clean way to add physical cards to ios wallet.

I use this with Lidl in the uk

Why does my hardware vendor need to get into designing passes?

What is next, ASUS making electric bike motors?

I didn't have this on my bingo card either. Ugh.

Slow news day on HN, I guess.

Why?

How in the world was it possible “back then” to be considered innovative and cutting-edge with just so few simple but beautiful products (iPod Classic, iPhone 4..) ?

This is genuinely interesting. It's possible in other ways but being able to use your phone as a building access key in some cases would be great.

I find it bizarre how Apple continuously ignores Steve Job's visions and seems to get away with it. I really expected there to be a little box that talks with people, is highly intelligent, and helps them to organize their daily lives. They could call it Isaac or something like that.

Yet what's new from Apple? A little color flyer design app. That would have rocked in the 1980s!

Apple bad brigade going hard in here.

Hard to root for something that only serves to entrench the monopoly further

Another artificial and pointless concept to make people subjected to Apple

These are reminiscent of NFTs, they are things you can collect, mass generated.