If you are a compulsive online shopper, you probably get a lot of emails from eBay sellers and online stores informing you about the shipping status of your latest purchases. To keep track of all your shipments, you need to keep those emails around and manually check the status of each shipment through the websites of the various courier services.
Junecloud’s Delivery Status for Mac OS X, a free Dashboard widget, and Delivery Status Touch, a $4.99 app for iOS, are a pair of beautifully designed companion apps that keep track of all your shipped items for you. And they sync with each other, so you can enter the tracking information on your iPad, iPhone or Mac and have it automatically show up on all three devices.
In the Mac OS X widget, you hit the Add (+) button to track a new item and enter a name to describe the shipment, along with its tracking number. For most packages, Delivery Status will automatically select the shipping company based on the tracking number. Just hit Done to start tracking the item.
It integrates with Growl to send you notifications every time the status of the item changes, so you can track it as it makes its way to you from across the country. It also lets you directly enter the order number from some online stores—like Adobe, Amazon and Apple—and will track the order’s shipment without the need to enter the tracking number.
Double-clicking on the item in the widget opens a map of its last known location in Google Maps and a handle on the right lets you rearrange your deliveries. It also saves information about your past shipments, so you can quickly look them up without having to dig through your email inbox.
Perhaps the most compelling feature of Delivery Status is the ability to sync your shipping items across your various devices. To do so, hit the Info (i) button on the widget and create a free Junecloud account from under the Sync tab. Also, be sure to enable the “Send notifications to Delivery Status touch (requires syncing)” option under the General tab to receive push notifications about status changes on your iOS devices.
On iOS, the universal app runs on both the iPad and iPhone and provides exactly the same set of features as its Mac counterpart, though wrapped in an even more well-designed UI. On both devices, you can enter your Junecloud login credentials (or sign up for a new account) to sync your data and create and keep track of shipments via push notifications.
Our only criticism is that, as great as the app is for residents of the United States, it does not have support for too many international courier services. It supports most of the international versions of Amazon and a few courier services from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan and several European countries, but the selection is far from comprehensive.
Also, it would be a neat feature to be able to forward a shipment notification email to a Junecloud address and have it automatically added to your tracking list.
Despite those omissions, however, Delivery Status is a set of excellent apps that give the user little to complain about. We wish there was more to say about these apps, but they are so tightly designed and work so well that there is not much to add. We highly recommend them.
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