For an app that autosaves your work and touts Dropbox support, Scrivener’s “Project Already Open” warning dialog is pretty objectionable. Scrivener has been open on my always-online home Mac without me touching it for several days, yet trying to edit it at work gets me three paragraphs of small text warning of data loss.
I can think of several possibilities for making this more elegant. The most obvious seems to be that if the computer sits idle for ten minutes or is put into sleep mode, Scrivener could delete all open projects’ lockfiles. It can immediately restore them as soon as it detects computer use (or better yet, only restore them when a Scrivener window is focused).
I know that sync status is kind of related to this. The thing is, if Dropbox sync fails, then it doesn’t really matter whether the Scrivener project is open or closed; you’re still going to have problems. But if you want to be super careful, perhaps instead of deleting lockfiles on idle, you could instead add a file to indicate it. So when a user opens a project on another computer, if Scrivener sees that idle file, it knows that the latest changes have been synced, and it can then delete both files and add its own new lockfile.
At the very very least, the dialog should be less scary (and, if possible, less wordy). If you don’t do any of the above, it should say that this is normal in syncing scenarios, and that you can proceed as long as no one else is working on it and all the changes have synced. If you do some of the above (and it works as I’m speculating), then the presence of the idle file should produce no dialog at all, and the absence of it should make a dialog that says that either the project has failed to sync or it hasn’t been long enough since they stopped working at another computer.
At this point I should say that Scrivener is completely awesome except for this one dialog that has me irked. And also I’m an idiot, so my above suggestions might not work the way I’m envisioning them or at all, and I will gladly accept people pointing out all my mistakes.
