Customers who are shipping from FileMaker Pro can easily add this function to their shipping integration by following instructions from our KnowledgeBase article.

Why print gift box labels from one printer and shipping labels from another and risk mixing up the “message” in your fulfillment department? Ship smarter with NRGship!

When printing to a thermal printer, the message can be printed out on a DocTab.  These can then be placed onto a gift card that goes inside of the box, and makes for an even more personalized shipment!

Tracking
No doubt Tracking will be the primary use of this application. Creating an account allows you to see any of your shipments created on the ups.com website as well as any past shipments that were tracked.

For tracking shipments coming to you – we suggest using iPhones copy/past function on the track number from your notification email subject instead of the tracking link. (see below)

Shipping
We think the jury is still out on shipping from the iPhone, but integration with the ups.com address book will greatly simplify the need to create on-the-go shipping labels. While you can’t print from the phone, the shipping label is conveniently delivered as a PDF attachment in email which can be printed back at the desktop.

Drop Off Locator
One of the handiest features has got to be the drop off locator. It has the ability to find the closest drop off based on your current GPS location, or from a manually entered zip code. You can then narrow down your drop off selection by type. This will surely help for those times when you need some assistance boxing up your item, or finding a location that can accept your package that’s to large for a drop box.

Shipping Quote
Another handy tool is the Quick Quote. By entering in the origin and destination information along with the rate, you can quickly see time in transit or estimated cost.

Version 1.0
While we have a laundry list of features that we’d like to see added or enhanced, this truly is a very solid v1.0 release. As of this posting, the App store currently rates the app at 3.5 stars from just 279 ratings, however posted feedback is very complimentary. Based on the fact that FedEx Mobile for the iPhone has almost 13,000 customer ratings, it seems that there is a lot of customer demand for robust functionality from mobile devices. USPS is expected to release a iPhone application in the upcoming weeks, so the race is on!

Congratulations to the UPS mobile team!

We’ll be posting a full review of UPS Mobile for the iPhone later this week, but it provides a full range of services including shipping, and does not require the user to create a UPS account in order to utilize basic functionality.

Mention is also made of NRGship, our Mac OS compatible desktop shipping application which fully supports UPS technologies.

Ship from your UPS.com Address book

Last week the USPS announced that they are offering a mobile-optimized version of the most popular functions from the usps.com website. While some will appreciate this addition, the implementation of the iPhone specific version is a bit disappointing.

1. No good looking icon for my iPhone home screen! – when you add the web page to your home iPhone, it’s displayed with a generic icon, making it hard to locate amidst all my apps and links. It doesn’t take much effort to create a 57×57 icon named apple-touch-icon.png.

2. No way home! There is always link home at the bottom of the page, but I have to scroll. Make the header image link home please.

3. Bad Form Validation. If I error in form input, it has to reload a page, which is really annoying on a mobile device. Simple client side JavaScript can have been utilized to check for form requirements/errors quickly.

4. Not optimized for the iPhone! There are tons of templates out there, and it’s not hard to create your own. iui or another framework could have been utilized to provide a iPhone-like appearance. At least the address bar could be hidden to provide more screen real estate.

5. The locator function could utilize Geographic Location Classes.

Mark Taylor, who facilitated the PARCEL Key Executive Forum, just released an article in PARCEL magazine which has eight great tips to reduce transportation costs. We especially like the tip about sending packages with “Hold For Pickup” instead of UPS Early AM as we know some NRGship customers are already doing this to cut costs! Check out our KnowledgeBase for more information on doing “Hold For Pickup” shipments.

Test your Maximum Driver skills with 2 new games – “Air Drop” and “Laserscape” – at racing.ups.com

We have to admit – it’s kind of fun.  You guide either David Ragan or the UPS Driver through the air or through a maze of lasers. UPS delivers more packages overnight on time in the U.S. than any other carrier – so you’re in for a challenge.

FedEx has launched five, 3-minute web-exclusive videos featuring Fred Willard (Anchorman, A Mighty Wind, Best in Show) in a series of entertaining, informative infomercial send-ups called, “1,2,3 Succeed!”

Easily paste a complete address from a web page, an email, your Ecommerce system or from another Mac application such as Quickbooks, MYOB, Lightspeed or Daylight.

Simply copy any address to your clipboard, create a new shipment and use the ⌘ 8 command and depending on the address format – it will populate all of your address fields as shown below: