Entering your credit card details manually into your browser could be a thing of the past thanks to a new feature in Safari on iOS 8.
According to 9to5 Mac, when a user gets to the payment screen using their iPhone or iPad to make a purchase online, the built-in browser will display a “Scan Credit Card” option.
They can then capture an image of the card, which the device will analyse using optical character recognition to enter the card number into the appropriate field.
The ability to choose from saved credit cards in the Passwords & AutoFill settings continues as before, but it’s not clear whether the scanned data can be saved, or if Scan Credit Card will recognise the cardholder’s name or the card’s expiry date.
Scan Credit Card is one of many new features in iOS 8. Aside from major developments in health care, there are also several updates for Safari in particular that, like Scan Credit Card, improve usability.
These include features such as interactive notifications, which let people respond to messages from within the notification, rather than having to open the app in question, improved tabbed browsing for iPad and the ability to request access to full desktop sites.
There is also greater continuity between iOS and OS X in the new editions of both operating systems. iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite look more alike, and devices running each operating system are automatically aware of each other when they are nearby.
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