Anymails

Like it or not, many of us spend a good deal of time and energy dealing with a shit-ton of email every day. While there are many techniques and work-flows that try to make this task easier, most of them leave you with the same old boring inbox. Unsatisfied with this, Carolin Horn and Florian Jenett of the Dynamic Media Institute went about creating a whole new way to look at your inbox. Based on the idea of a microscopic biological ecosystem (like the ones your teacher made you look at under the microscope in high school biology), Anymails represents different types of email as different as various little beasties swimming around your screen. Attributes such as email category (work, family, school, etc), freshness, and read status all effect how the bugs behave– adjusting size, opacity, speed, and furriness accordingly. Anymails was built using Flash and Processing, and the source can be downloaded to run on your own OS X machine.

[via NOTCOT]