Tried to open a Scrivener doc from Dropbox, but having chosen a file (that I knew was closed on my other Mac) the chooser locked up and clicks returned an error sound. after a bit of fiddling I realised Scrivener had put up a dialog behind the file chooser. I could see the top edge of it but not click it to bring it forward. I had to Force Quit the app.
On a hunch, I opened Scrivener on my other Mac (it was closed) and it opened the app and the doc I couldn’t open on the other Mac. Ah - so some sort of lock flag was set? Anyway I closed the doc and app, switched back to the first Mac and all now works.
I suspect the hidden dialog was trying to tell me about this, but a bug means it’s drawn behind the other Scrivener windows thus effectively locking the app UI.
I should be able to avoid this but I’d no idea that closing the app with a doc open set a lock flag. Not mention if it on the header post of the stick thread of Scrivener and Dropbox. I’m sure this will get fixed but I hope this helps anyone else wondering why the file chooser has locked up.
Warning boxes are requested to be displayed by the system, and after that point it is up to the system to handle the display of them, as well as any properties of that box (such as if it should be modal, which it sounds like this one was—that means it locks you out of using the program until you address the dialogue box). In some cases I’ll see this happen (in all kinds of programs to be clear, not just Scrivener, as I say this is handled 100% by OS X) and the trick that I found works best is to use Mission Control to dig out the hidden dialogue box. You should have a button on your keyboard for that (mine is on the F3 key) and if you combine that button with the Ctrl key, it will limit Mission Control to only displaying windows from the current application; very useful if you are like me and have a hundred things going on at once.
And yes, there is a lock when you open a project, as only one computer should ever be using a project at once. This lock is removed when you successfully close the project—force quitting the software does not qualify for that, so the lock was left in place. It is a “soft” lock, if you know for sure the project isn’t open elsewhere, you can bypass it. In this case it would have been safe, since you know the lock was only there because of an abort.
