Thanks for this. Looking at it and searching on it, it seems that this is a WebKit bug rather than a Scrivener bug, but hopefully I’ll be able to find a workaround. Either way, I didn’t know about the crash and I can reproduce it, so you certainly qualify for a free copy - I’ll PM you with the details.
I didn’t know If you already know about this crash (probably you do), but when I use a dictionary in scrivener and switch to the dashboard (the screen with all the widgets) and use the dictionary there scrivener crashes.
Use the dictionary to search a word
Use the trackpad or F4 to go to the dashboard
Use the dictionary there (and there or just before that scrivener crashes).
I can’t reproduce that one, I’m afraid, although on some systems the popover dictionary is known to be a little flaky (in general). Could you please send your crash report (or let me know if you’ve already sent an automatic one so I can hunt it out)?
Thanks. As you note, this is the same issue the other user above has - it’s an issue on Lion for occasional users in general, and not isolated to Scrivener from what I’ve found online (although it seems bizarre in that a user might experience it in Scrivener but not in another program, whereas another user might not experience it in Scrivener but will find it crashes another program). It only affects a handful of users, too - I use the ctrl-cmd-D dictionary all of the time without any problems. That said, if you find that this only happens in one project whereas others are fine, and if you take that project to another computer and it crashes there, too, let me know and I’d be grateful if I could take a look at the project.
Here’s one that is fully reproducible on my machine.
I’m using a MacBook Air 2012, 2GHz 8GB, Mountain Lion 10.8.2
Have document open, in full screen view (i.e. in its own “space” if you will)
File – New Document – Blank document. Name it, save it.
The new document is started, and immediately maximized
In my toolbar, I have the “LAYOUT” button, for choosing the workspace layout I like the most. Click it, choose a layout, hit USE.
The layout is implemented. Then hit the red close button in the layout dialog box.
Scrivener crashes.
I have sent in two reports already, but saved you from more.
Let me know if you can’t find my crash dump and I’ll email it to you, it’s too big to be allowed in my post.
I can’t find your crash reports. Could you please give me something that will help me look them up, like the name you used in them or suchlike? Alternatively, please attach one to this thread.
Here’s an interesting addition to the above: Thought I’d reproduce it again, in order to attach a crash dump to my post (as opposed to pasting into which I tried before, my bad).
Today, I found that Scrivener behaved slightly differently. Following my own directions from the other day, step 3 didn’t work the same for me today: “The new document is started and immediately maximized”.
For some reason, even though creating the new document with the first document open and in full screen/its own space, creating the new document made the screen switch back to my non-full-screen space, and display the new document there, as a window. And at that point, following the rest of my instructions did not create a crash.
After some research, I found that the difference is in step 0, i.e. before my instructions for reproducing:
It seems the already-open document must be started not from within Scrivener, but with Scrivener closed and by double-clicking the document in Finder. That document must also have be saved in full screen mode, so that immediately when Scrivener starts it goes into full screen.
This seems to keep Scrivener from bouncing back to the non-full-screen space when the new doc is created in step 2, which causes the crash to appear as described.
Oh well, not a crash everyone will run into every day, but a crash all the same
Thanks - and argh, that last crash report is completely different to the other two. Could you please try the following for me?
Remove all icons from your toolbar using Customize Toolbar…
Try it again and see if you still get the crash.
If so, please send me the crash report.
(Please trigger the first kind of crash you had rather than the second variation on it - I’ll worry about that afterwards.)
The reason I ask you to try this is that the first crash reports indicate that the crash is occurring while the toolbar is validating, so removing all of the toolbar items should prevent that from happening, or at least cause the crash report to tell us something different.
Hm. Sorry about that — from my perspective it’s just one crash, following the exact same set of instructions. So if there’s two different causes in the dumps, that’s really something I can’t explain…
Anyways, I did it again, after removing all icons from my toolbar.
This time, step 4 obviously changes to “choose window > layouts > manage layouts” where I select a layout, then click USE as before.
In my eyes it’s the exact same crash — I hope the log agrees…
Sorry, I wasn’t saying that they were different crashes, just that the crash reports were telling me different things, so I wanted to separate them out. This crash is the same as the last ones you sent, which is frustrating, because everything in it is deep Apple code and it doesn’t report a single method I have written myself - which is the thread I’m looking for to start unpicking things.
I reproduced the crash on my machine, by the way, but had to reboot - the whole main space got locked down, so I couldn’t even extract a crash report.
I posted this in you announcement thread before reading the rules:
On Mac OS X Mountain Lion:
Open a new document.
Enter the text File://
Scrivener will crash.
Several notes:
Please close any live documents before attempting to reproduce this.
You actually need three slashes, and there is a after the last slash
I didn’t enter the literal string because it would have crashed my browser.
This is a bug in an Apple library – in the CheckDataDetector routine that’s invoked when you enter a URL in a document. I bet we’ll be seeing a fix from Apple today or tomorrow. I heard about it in the TWiT podcast yesterday ( youtube.com/watch?v=5r99PxUiXIQ#t=120m
Thanks, yes, I noticed your post over the weekend and was going to reply today. There’s no need to re-post it in this thread, though, as this is a global OS X bug, as you note, so sadly it’s in Apple’s hands. What a bizarre Mountain Lion bug, though!
I pulled the comment from the other thread just after posting it here.
It occurred to me that you might have some unexplained crash reports in your logs about this problem; I thought it was worthy of reporting. Besides, I always wanted bragging rights: to be able to say that I once crashed Scrivener – and the rewards (ahem) of being the first to report a problem.
Fredrik - I believe I have fixed the crash you reported for the next update. I have also refunded you your Scrivener licence fee of $45 as a reward for helping me track and fix this bug, as promised in the first post of this thread.
Thank you but really not necessary.
I’m just happy to help, and I enjoy using Scrivener more than most software I own.
(And if some time in the future you’d find time to include any of my feature suggestions that’s worth more than any refund in the world…)
Seriously. This is a program I want to pay for. Do you really want to make me buy it again…?
