When I think of Birdseye I usually think of delicious frozen peas. Now, however, there’s Birdseye the mail app, a simpler and more streamlined system for handling your mail.
Aimed at the email grazer rather than folks who get hundreds of messages a minute, Birdseye separates emails into folders where they are displayed in a graphically rich and easy-to-read way. Instead of, say, sliding through fifty Groupon emails, Birdseye will extract the text and images from these subscription emails and make them into a Flipboard-esque magazine. While the vast majority of us email nerds would argue that this is, as they say in the industry, a “horrible idea,” remember that not everyone’s mailboxes are full to the bursting point.
Birdseye Mail for the iPad from Birdseye Mail on Vimeo.
Created by Robert Spychala, a programmer who had a hand in the Barnes & Noble Nook and Nike FuelBand, the app is aimed at tablet users who are tired of ugly interfaces like Gmail and Mailbox.
“Birdseye is designed for a tablet first, not ported over from a desktop or web experience,” said Spychala. This allows Birdseye to take advantage of the iPad’s inherent characteristics like a beautiful visual screen in your hands and gesture friendly interface.”
Seed capital for the app came from DE-DE, a marketing startup accelerator, which gives you some idea why this app was built. However, this isn’t just for looking at marketing emails. The system also allows you to unsubscribe from emails right with the press of a button – a wildly useful feature – and the app will flow your regular emails into beautifully laid-out templates. It also uses Open Graph to bring in friend information from Twitter and Facebook.
“Birdseye also assigns a quick one-tap action distinct to each email format so you can handle your mail quickly and intuitively,” said Spychala. “For example a message from Facebook or Twitter about a new Friend Request or Follower would have a quick action of ‘accept and follow back.’ Or a calendar invite might be accept and add to calendar.'”
“We believe in Inbox Intuition. We want to create more ways to view and manage your email quickly and naturally without extra work,” he said.
The app is available now and is free. While it probably won’t help you handle the million-plus emails in your work mailbox, it might be a nice addition to your at-home browsing arsenal which probably already includes iReddit and Houzz.