>> I have a need to display some auxiliary information from my plugin, that 
>> doesn't end up rendered to the destination. Is it acceptable to instantiate 
>> a window and use bindings (or update views in the execute method) to display 
>> this information? Or is that a big no-no?
> 
> [thread stuff]
> 
> But no explicit reason it should not work to my knowledge. 

In general, this is "bad form" (i.e. if a background process, like quicklook or 
spotlight, touches it, it pops up a window;  that's weird).  That said, it'll 
work as long as you ensure that AppKit calls get executed on the main thread.  
Keep in mind that executeAtTime: isn't necessarily called as you may expect it 
to (i.e. it could only ever get called once, but then plugin tear down doesn't 
happen for hours -- you'll have a stale window sitting around waiting for 
something to do in the interval).

Often (but not always), the settings panel in QC is used to display auxiliary 
information, or the window is configured to only ever get displayed/loaded if 
it's running in the QuartzComposer Editor.  That keeps other things that touch 
QC from acting weird (Finder, iTunes, ScreenSavers, and many other 
commonly-used applications can load QC content, and if it's not in safe mode 
your plugin will load as well).

If the settings panel isn't sufficient, an aux window may be in order -- make 
sure you handle multiple simultaneous instances nicely, and you'll probably be 
ok.  You might want to entertain clearly marking the window so users know where 
it's coming from, since it's a rather unconventional thing for a QC plugin to 
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