Tim Place has posted a very interesting idea about handling presets and time:
We both came up with what essentially the same idea expressed in different ways. An interface where the Z-axis represents the progression of time. In terms what the user sees at any given time, it is like a single frame of a movie. Each frame then would represent the state or algorithm representing the state of the relevant Max patches or Jamoma module. Progression through these frames (or interpolating between them would be analogous to stepping through cues in a cuelist.
So, instead of watching time going across – you watch it like a movie. In some ways this similar to the way Apple has chosen to represent time in their Time Machine for OS 10.5. It would particularly nice if you could quickly scroll through time by using the scroll-wheel on the mouse.
I particularly like the idea of using Jitter matrices for handling the data, and possibly also OpenGL for rotation and zooming.