Overnight

Developer: Bottle Rocket Apps
Price: $4.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0

iPhone Integration [rating:4.5/5]
User Interface [rating:4.5/5]
Re-use / Replay Value [rating:4/5]

Overall Rating:

Overnight from Bottle Rocket Apps is aimed squarely at business owners, but if you're in the market for a tracking app with solid features and slick design, you can't go wrong with this purchase.

Simply put, Overnight can be summed up by its rather extraordinarily long iTunes Store title: "Overnight: Express Shipping, Tracking, Pricing & Drop Locations" (try to say that 5 times fast). The app packs in several tools that elevate it above simple tracking software. Divided into tabs along the bottom of the home screen you have Locations, ZIP Finder, Tracking, and Price. The Locations tab uses your location aware iPhone / iPod Touch to find nearby brick and mortar buildings for the 4 major carriers, allowing you to filter by carrier, distance, days open, whether the location is staffed, and whether the location uses metric; ZIP Finder (also available as a separate free app) displays the current ZIP code for your area, as well as 3 others nearby; the Tracking tab is for, well, tracking your packages; and the Price tab allows you to calculate the cost of your package and even compare between carriers.

The richness of what could have been an oversimplified app makes Overnight really shine. Too often developers fail to consider how users will actually utilize their software, and it's apparent that Bottle Rocket put some serious thought into their design. When you click one of the nearby carrier locations, you're presented with a phone number button to immediately call the carrier, a Map button that launches Google Maps for the location, and a Share button that launches Mail to send the location info to someone, as well as detailed information such as address, hours of operation, latest express, latest ground, and other services the site offers. When you select one of your packages being tracked, along with the status you're given a mini-map, details for the journey of the package, and buttons for calling the carrier, visiting their website, and an email button for sending package tracking info to someone.

Not only is the app well thought out, but Bottle Rocket wraps the features in an incredibly pleasing GUI. Carrier info is displayed with rich textures centered around the business logo and colors. Buttons are glossy and feel embedded in the forms, giving interaction with the app a more tactile feel. The attractiveness of Overnight's design is what we've come to expect from Apple software in general, and Bottle Rocket really seems to have taken that design ethic to heart.

Overnight is not without its flaws, however. On several of the packages I was tracking, it failed to recognize the carrier on the initial status screen, but would display the logo once you selected the tracking numbers to get details. This would render the phone and email buttons inside the package details screen to be useless. One of the items we followed from UPS never returned status. I'm not sure if this is an issue with Overnight's data pull, or an issue with the carrier's database. Given the fact that I've had issues in the past with the carriers' own websites, I'll give Overnight the benefit of the doubt.

All-in-all, if you're looking for a package tracker with a robust set of features for business or personal use, you can't do much better than Overnight.