I keep adding the Scrivener icon to my desktop so I can click straight through from startup, but it keeps vanishing, necessitating access via Finder. This isn’t a massive inconvenience, but it would be nice to rectify it, and I’m not sure why it’s happening.
Where are you dragging the icon from? Have you actually installed Scrivener properly into your Applications folder? To me, it sounds as though you may have dragged an alias of the application from the .dmg file.
All the best,
Keith
That might be the case, but that still shouldn’t result in disappearing icons. In fact, aliases to items within DMGs are a very handy way of ignoring the fact that they are in DMGs. They will automatically mount the resource when you double-click on them. If the original DMG is gone (trashed for instance) then the alias should present the error dialogue stating it cannot find the original file. The alias shouldn’t ever disappear from the Desktop just because it cannot find its resource.
Are you using Hazel, or perhaps an application which promises to keep your drive “clean”?
The next time it disappears, you could try opening the Desktop through the Finder. This can be done by going into your Home folder, double-clicking on “Desktop” and then turning on list mode (Cmd-2). If the icon isn’t there, something is removing it. If it is in the List, but not visible, click once on the Desktop (not the Finder window version) and press Cmd-J. This lets you control the way icons appear on your Desktop. Bottom of this panel contains a control for automatic sorting. Try turning that on if it isn’t already by selecting ‘Name’. Note, if you have icons arranged all over the place and you don’t want to lose their positioning, you may not want to do this! Finder will reorganise everything into rows and columns.
While I understand everyone has their personal preferences in regards to this sort of thing, you might try simply using the Dock to store the icon. That is what it is designed to do.
Thanks for this. Sorry I wasn’t very clear. I’m opening Scrivener from the dock. But when I quit Scrivener at the end of a session, the icon disappears from the dock.
Okay that would make more sense than a Desktop icon disappearing, but it still doesn’t make any sense! 
This is still strange behaviour, though probably nothing that Scrivener can do anything about (sounds like an Apple bug). If you are in fact dragging the icon there from the DMG instead of having first installed it into Applications and dragging it from there, it shouldn’t disappear but act similar to the behaviour described for an alias. It should mount the DMG automatically and if that fails, it will acquire a Question Mark Overlay when you attempt to execute it from the dock. It should never disappear on its own accord.
Does this happen with other applications? Do you have them all stored in the same location? How do you typically add them, by dragging from the Finder, or moving them around on the Dock after they are open? When does it disappear; under what conditions: reboot only? Any log out? Periodically all by itself while you are working in another program?
Does the icon stay once you find scrivener and launch it until you restart your system?
The dock will show the icon of running programs so the icon you are seeing may be the one you started. Keep in mind that unlike Windows, simply closing a window does not actually quit a running application. So you may not have actually created a shortcut to sciivener on the dock.
Does this make sense?
It disappears at reboot only. I’ve added it by dragging from the Finder. It’s no biggie, just a bit mystifying.
I have seen the same behaviour on the Mac of a friend who is a total newbie (shiny new aluminium MacBook as her first Mac ever, not bad!) and the cause for the vanishing icon was what everyone guessed here—she hadn’t installed the app (not Scrivener, by the way) properly.
So just to make this 100% clear, lexicool: Did you mount the Scrivener dmg and drag the Scrivener icon on the left (aside from the readme file and the extras folder) into the application folder (in the finder or maybe the alias of it in the dock if you put one in there)?
And if so, did you then close the dmg and open Scrivener by double-clicking its icon in the app folder? And after it is running did you right-click on the Scrivener icon in the dock and tick “Keep In Dock”?
Final question: When you reboot and the Scrivener icon is gone from the dock, is it still in the applications folder?
The answer to all these questions is yes, and now it’s appearing in the dock at reboot. Not sure what the story was, but glad it appears to be resolved. Thanks for all the advice.
It might be that sometimes when you click on the icon to bring Scrivener to the front, you accidentally do a very small click and drag. This is one area of interface feedback that Apple dropped the ball on. When you move an icon around on the Dock, that automatically tells it to stick once you quit the application. But if you drag it out of the Dock, it will rubber-band back, what is typically symbolic of a cancelled action. However, it actually removed the application from the Dock. It just hasn’t disappeared yet because Scrivener is still open. They should have put the little implosion animation in there to alert the user that something other than a cancelled drag has happened.