[Geoff Waddington]

Ok, it's starting to become a bit more clear.

I'll post my thoughts about the re-design process here, blog style, so that people can chime in with good ideas as we go.

The notion of Cluster is cool for things like Channel.

The notion of Bank or Shift is cool for things like Zone.

The notion of Layout is cool for things like Virtual Surface Channel order/placement.

The realization is that Widgets live in a "sea" of contexts, not a nice linear container style hierarchy.

When you ask a question about a Widget's Shift status, you want to ask its current Zone-ness.

When you want to a question about a Widget's Channel position, you want ask its current Layout-ness in the horizontal direction.

So, a Widget ends up with a list of Contexts, and corresponding lists of pertinent questions/operations for each Context.

As far as Virtual Surface Layout, we already have horizontal Layout (Channels), we just have to add vertical for matrix style controllers like the C4, etc.

Now we still have the 3rd dimension, depth.

If you think about it, a Layer and an FX template are really the same thing, they represent a certain mapping of Widgets to Actions/FX parameters.

So, switching Layers, switching FX, etc., is really just a switch in the depth dimension.

Each layer in the depth dimension comes with it's own set of contexts (Zone, Layout, etc.)

Still pondering...