Computational layers of lipstick. And rip-offs of stuff that's been around for decades, that Adobe didn't invent (like tabbed windows, which Adobe patented and sued Macromedia over, in spite of all the prior art).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#Patent_dispute

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/to.jag.txt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...

Around 1990, Glenn Reid wrote a delightful original "Font Appreciation" app for NeXT called TouchType, which decades later only recently somehow found its way into Illustrator. Adobe even CALLED it the "Touch Type Tool", but didn't give him any credit or royalty. The only difference in Adobe's version of TouchType is that there's a space between "Touch" and "Type" (which TouchType made really easy to do), and that it came decades later!

Illustrator tutorial: Using the Touch Type tool | lynda.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUkE3XLw_EA

SUMMARY OF BaNG MEETING #4, July 18, 1990: https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1990/_CS...

TOUCHTYPE Glenn Reid, Independent NeXT Developer

The next talk was given by Glenn Reid, who previously worked at both NeXT and Adobe. He demonstrated the use of his TouchType application, which should prove to be an enormous boon to people with serious typesetting needs.

TouchType is unlike any other text-manipulation program to date. It takes the traditional "draw program" metaphor used by programs like TopDraw and Adobe Illustrator and extends it to encompass selective editing of individual characters of a text object. To TouchType, text objects are not grouped as sequences of characters, but as individually movable letters. For instance, the "a" in "BaNG" can be moved independently of the rest of the word, yet TouchType still remembers that the "a" is associated with the other three letters.

Perhaps the best feature of this program is the ability to do very accurate and precise kerning (the ability to place characters closer together to create a more natural effect). TouchType supports intelligent automatic kerning and very intuitive, manual kerning done with a horizontal slider or by direct character manipulation. It also incorporates useful features such as sliders to change font sizes, character leading, and character widths, and an option which returns characters to a single base line.

TouchType, only six weeks in development, should be available in early August, with a tentative price of $249. BaNG members were given the opportunity to purchase the software for $150.