Hi Rick,
a much simpler solution (rather than bringing up a window from the
plugin) would be putting out status information as a string output
from your custom patch and using the "Broadcasting"-Patch (or the new
one whith IP-bound data transfere) to send the data out of the
composition (as a string) to another displaying composition with the
corresponding receiving patches. This composition can be running on
the same computer, or even on a different computer on the same
network, to display the data.
Best,
Achim Breidenbach
Boinx Software
On 27.04.2010, at 06:25, Rick Mann wrote:
On Apr 26, 2010, at 21:04:25, Christopher Wright wrote:
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 do.
In this case, my plugin is used by an expert user in a limited
setting: a video production. He needs to see additional status (in
particular, that the plugin ran into network issues getting data)
that shouldn't be displayed in the video stream.
I'd also like to be able to put buttons up that the user can click
to initiate actions within my plugin (fetching new data, for example).
I didn't see anything that suggested I could have UI send an action
message (Obj-C message) to my plugin.
Finally, I don't see either the preview settings or my host app
showing the values of the published outputs. Am I looking in the
wrong place?
TIA,
Rick
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