Steve, per your instruction, here is a new thread for floating devices. It would be great to be able to customize the position of devices on the screen. Or, to be able to embed them within views. This would make manipulating the views much easier than scrolling through many devices on the sidebar.
Recently I was developing a report that was to be used as a sensitivity analysis and as such had a fair few variables that were linked to a formula. I was able to put the variables onto the sidebar but this then became quite complicated and not user friendly.
I haven't seen a way of doing this but I thought it would be quite useful if you could add the variable inputs to a view or somewhere else on screen so that you can position them as and how you like. It may well be that you could have an input device within a view that is linked to a variable perhaps.