If you shop online frequently and are nutty about keeping a close eye on the whereabouts of your packages, Junecloud’s Delivery Status touch could be useful. The rest of us will probably find it a bit of a yawn.
Delivery Status touch, which began life as a Mac dashboard widget, enables you to track your packages as they travel through DHL, FedEx, UPS, USPS and other carrier systems as well as packages sent from Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Google Checkout and Nintendo.
Right now, I’m keeping an eye on a package that’s on its way to me via UPS from NewEgg.com, where I frequently shop for computer gear. NewEgg sent me an email with the UPS tracking info. I simply clicked on the UPS number included in the email and up came a page on the company’s site with tracking info. Looks like I’ll get the package in about 2 days.
To see what I might get out of using Junecloud’s app, I fired it up. First things first, I need to set up an account. I don’t want to sign up for yet another account but it looks like I have no choice. That process took longer than I expected because I kept getting errors messages about my password and account set up. I turned Delivery Status touch off, relaunched, and then it worked.
Next,I entered a name for the package and the tracking number. I inadvertently entered “Asia” instead of “Asus” as the name of the package I wanted to track. Although I corrected the mistake twice after I relaunching the app, “Asia” kept popping up as the package name. Nevermind, I think.
According to Delivery Status touch , the package will arrive in 3 days from now. That’s odd. I went directly to the UPS site and entered my tracking number and I see th e delivery has been rescheduled and that I will indeed get the package in about 3 days from now.
Okay, so Delivery Status touch is more up-to-date than the tracking info at NewEgg. That’s enough to convince me the app does what the developer says it does.
The thing is about this delivery status app, however, is that it really doesn’t help me beyond the way I track packges now. I get maybe two or three packages a month and I just don’t need a separate app to track them for me. I expect that’s true for most people. I gave Delivery Status touch okay marks considering the problems I experienced, but low marks for practicality and then split the difference.
