I never quite realized how much physics and systems engineering goes into simulating motions—not only do computer systems have to calculate each pixel at a time but it also needs to make sure that there is a memory to hold those calculated values and that the computations are fast enough to display in real-time. Especially in the “wet fonts” section, I saw how much calculations go into simulating watercolor brush strokes, and it made me grateful for apps like photoshop and procreate that let me bypass the whole process and skip to the result. Reading the paper written with 90s technology in mind also made me recognize the advancement of visual design tools since then. Hearing about how multiple servers and sound systems had to work together to create something that can now be done by one person in adobe made me realize how many tools we take for granted.

It was also exciting to see that many of the works mentioned in his conclusions/future works section have come to fruition, such as a robust text editor or the simulation of bristly brushes. One area that I think may still be in the process of being realized is the dynamic comment linking and annotations. The way he described it made me think of google doc and word document comments, but I’m not sure if either of them exactly matches the approach he was proposing in the paper.