The Future of Deliveries Deliveries began as a hobby—it was first released as a Dashboard widget named “Apple…
Delivery Status 4.0 beta
It’s time for a major update to Delivery Status! There are a ton of new features in this version that make it nicer and easier to use. You can see a lot of these things in the screenshot above, like the new history menu, and custom Growl icons. Here’s a full list of what has changed since 3.9:
- The delivery history has been completely redone. Now all of the settings for your past deliveries are remembered, not just the tracking number!
- You can now add a custom item name for any delivery type! Even better this item name is listed in the history to help you find past deliveries easier
- There is now a “Clear History” option at the bottom of the history menu
- If you use the magnified view, Delivery Status will now remember this the next time you open a new widget
- Custom Growl icons are now displayed to indicate the delivery company
- Growl notifications are no longer displayed right after you’ve edited your settings or if you update manually, since you’re already looking at the results
- Upgraded to Growl framework 1.1.2
- DHL Germany deliveries will now show the information in the process (“Vorgang”) field
- Improved tracking results for Amazon orders
- Fixed UPS
- Fixed FedEx SmartPost (Customer ID is no longer required for FedEx SmartPost shipments)
- Fixed Royal Mail
- Fixed Google Checkout (again, twice!)
- Fixed minor problems with USPS tracking
- Fixed problems with the installer on certain computers
- Fixed version checking in Leopard (unfortunately Leopard users with older versions will not be notified of any updates, so please help spread the word!)
- Added high resolution icons for Leopard
- A simple donation request is now displayed after a shipment has been delivered
New in beta 7:
- Updated translations, and fixed some cases where the delivery company text would not get translated
- The correct tooltip will now display when you hold your mouse over the History button
- Fixed a problem where Growl notifications may not have displayed when they should
- Fixed some display problems in Tiger
New in beta 8:
- Removed some debug code that resulted in a lot of useless console messages for English users
New in beta 9:
- Improvements to Japanese and Italian translations
Holy crap that’s a lot of stuff.
Update: This beta is now over, and 4.0 has been released. Thanks everyone for all of your help!
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Comments
This entry has 10 comments.
Aaron Gyes wrote on January 13, 2008:
Thanks! I often have a few SmartPost items on my dashboard, I no longer need to keep them ontop of stickies to try to label which is which!
Jitesh wrote on January 14, 2008:
I really like your widget and I’m looking forward to trying out the new beta.
One request I do have though (not sure if you added it to this version): can you make this widget work with the .Mac Dashboard sync? Right now I’m using 3.9, and while it will open up Delivery Status instances on the second computer, all the tracking information is missing. It would be awesome if you could add support for syncing.
Thanks!
Mike Piontek wrote on January 14, 2008:
Jitesh, the widget does work with .Mac syncing. I’ve used it with 3.9 and I tested again just now with 4.0 beta 6. Widgets not open on one computer will appear with the correct settings after a sync.
I’m not sure what could be causing the problem on your end, but I am following all of Apple’s guidelines. One thing that comes to mind is that you should make sure you have the same version of the widget on both computers. .Mac does not sync the widget software itself, just the settings, so using different versions may cause conflicts.
Jitesh wrote on January 14, 2008:
Hmm, I’ll check on the versions and see if that’s the reason.
Alan Somers wrote on January 17, 2008:
I just installed 4.0b9 and it fixes a problem with one of my UPS packages. Oddly enough, the other package’s status was showing up fine under 3.9. What is it about UPS’s web site that forces updates to these tracking apps so often?
Mike Piontek wrote on January 17, 2008:
Believe it or not it was a single space that broke the UPS tracking this time. When you’re updating a site, an extra space, tab, or return isn’t something you would ever think about. But for a widget like this, it’s important, and it was no longer able to find the section of the page it was looking for.
Generally I try to make my widget as flexible as possible as far as minor differences in the HTML, but it’s difficult to account for everything!
Aaron Gyes wrote on January 17, 2008:
You might want to look into using something like mechanize and beautiful soup so that you’re working on DOM stuff more than big giant strings.
Mike Piontek wrote on January 19, 2008:
While that would help in some respects (like the space problem with UPS) I find regular expressions easier to work with. (I don’t use plain strings, that’d break constantly!) Really if I wanted to keep it flexible I’d have to use regular expressions anyway. This way I can have everything in a single expression, which makes it pretty easy to work with.
Usually when the markup changes it’s something much more significant—this is the first time the widget has broken because of a single character changing. So parsing the DOM wouldn’t make it any easier to maintain. I’m inclined to think it would make it more complicated, really! Thanks for the suggestion though, I appreciate it.
Mino wrote on January 24, 2008:
Any chance to add support for Post Danmark (Danish post)?
Thanks in advance!
Mike Piontek wrote on January 25, 2008:
They’re on my list of possible additions—though they’re fairly low on a very long list. I do my best to add the most popular requests eventually!