Adobe Air UPS Tracking
Track your parcels from the comfort of your linux desktop!
Today I noticed that UPS have developed a widget that allows Windows and Mac users to track their parcels. This looked useful, as I would no longer have to sit refreshing a web page to satisfy my curiosity as to where my parcels I send are, but just wait for pop-up notifications from an application that sits in my system tray.
First you'll need Adobe Air. Adobe's Linux installer doesn't perform all of the steps required for 64-bit systems, and their guide is a bit lengthy, so I've transcribed it into a shell script which you can download: install-adobe-air-ubuntu-64bit.sh
The UPS site claims that Linux support is "coming soon", and they seem to do some user agent sniffing with Flash, so I downloaded it in a Windows and placed a copy here
The first thing to do once you've made an account is to click Options at the bottom and untick "Show Widget Character", "Show News Ticker" and "Show News Flashes" to make these annoying resource-hungry bits go away. Now you're left with the bare window. Alas it has a huge black surround (which is transparent on Windows and Mac), it and consumes a fair amount of CPU power just idling, but it does appear to work. You can even minimize it to the system tray. Hopefully the Linux version is indeed coming soon, and will address these issues. At least UPS recognize that use Linux users exist, and chose a cross-platform technology.
Now I can send my parcels from the comfort of my workplace, with a guarantee they'll be picked up between 10am and 5.30pm next day (when I'm at work; DHL/HDNL through Parcels2Go can't guarantee this timeframe) without having to take time to visit the post office, I can track and get progress alerts from this widget, and if the parcel is over 2kg, its cheaper than Royal Mail anyway, when booked through Interparcel. Despite the Economy service being advertised as non-guaranteed next-day, all of the parcels I have sent have arrived next day. What could be better than that?
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