One of the major iOS 6 features that was showcased during the WWDC 2012 Keynote was the new Passbook application.

As announced, Passbook is a time and location aware app for storing digital boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons, loyalty cards, and more.

Here’s the description of the app from the iOS 6 preview page:

Your boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons, loyalty cards, and more are now all in one place. With Passbook, you can scan your iPhone or iPod touch to check in for a flight, get into a movie, and redeem a coupon. You can also see when your coupons expire, where your concert seats are, and the balance left on that all-important coffee bar card. Wake your iPhone or iPod touch, and passes appear on your Lock screen at the appropriate time and place — like when you reach the airport or walk into the store to redeem your gift card or coupon. And if your gate changes after you’ve checked in for your flight, Passbook will even alert you to make sure you’re not relaxing in the wrong terminal.

Even though Apple has seeded two beta versions of iOS 6 to developers, the Passbook app has remained a mystery. Apple seeded iOS 6 beta 2 to developers yesterday, where it changed the splash screen. So how does it actually work.

The good news is that some folks have created a website called PassSource, which allows you to create free test passes for the Passbook app, which allows you to figure out how it works.

All you need to do is follow these simple instructions to create test passes, which will allow you to use the Passbook app:

• Point your iOS 6 device’s Safari browser to passsource.com
• Tap on Individual Passes
• Here you’ll see different types of test pass options. Select one of the them.
• You will now see several fields that can be edited. Leave everything as default and tap on the Create button at the bottom.
• Once the pass is created, you will see the preview of the pass. Tap on the Add button at the top right corner to add the pass to the Passbook app.
• Launch the Passbook app and you should see the test pass in the app. You can tap on the Settings option in the bottom right corner to set Notifications when there are updates to the pass or to show up in the lock screen based on time or location.

You can check out the demo video embedded below to get glimpse on how the Passbook app works, including the cool shredding animation when you delete the pass:

This is pretty neat. We hope that airlines and other retailers jump on board and start issuing passes for the Passbook app by the time iOS 6 is released later this fall.

Thanks Jose for the tip!

Related:

Check out the Passbook-enabled apps that are available in the App Store.

[via RedmondPie]