Installation problem on Mountain Lion: "yEd Graph Editor Installer" is damaged

Question

I am having trouble installing yEd on Mountain Lion. When I double-click the installer application that is on the yEd .dmg file, I get an alert dialog saying that the application is damaged and can't be opened.

What can I do?

Comments

Thanks for asking the question. It would be great if the developers could submit the app to Apple for signing off.

Answer 1

The message you see when trying to start the yEd installer application is due to the default security settings of Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). These allow only applications downloaded from
  "Mac App Store and identified developers"
(cf. Apple menu > "System Preferences..." > "Personal" section > "Security & Privacy" > "General" pane).

Being a long-before-Mountain-Lion-application, the yEd installer is not specifically signed for Mountain Lion, and since it is not from the Mac App Store either, your system prompts you with this (highly misleading) alert.

If you change the setting in the "Security & Privacy" preferences to "Anywhere", you can run the yEd installer application and install yEd on your Mac without any problems.

Comments

Or use the WebStart Version.

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You can also right click on "yEd Graph Editor Installer.app" and click "Open", that will bypass the Montain Lion app source security policy and execute it normally.

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This (right-click and "open") is the best answer for getting around the problem, as the "official answer" above will change your default security setting and open you up for problems down the road.

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That didnt work for me.

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See my comment below under the terminal command fix. This seems to be a problem with Mac OSX security and JAR files from the internet.

Answer 2

 

Comments

You can also right click on "yEd Graph Editor Installer.app" and click "Open", that will bypass the Montain Lion app source security policy and execute it normally. -- This is actually the best answer for getting around the problem, since using the "official answer" above will change your default security setting and open you up for problems down the road.

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For some reason, right-clicking + "Open" didn't work for me when I was trying it. Changing the security settings temporarily, just for one installation, achieves the same effect.

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The right click thing didnt work for me either.

Answer 3

The problem is that the app isn't signed with a proper Developer ID. To work around it as a user: copy the app to the Desktop, then open Terminal.app and execute:

xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine ~/Desktop/yEd*

After that you can run the app and install the program.

Note to the developers: please distribute the application as a standard Apple installer package instead.

Comments

Some additional information is required as this can be a problem with an installer application or drag-and-drop installed applications. Applications are packages (special folders) not individual files and with ML digital signing is necessary depending on your security settings. The "Open" method described above works for Cocoa-based applications, but I have found that since Apple removed Java - the JAR files inside an application bundle don't seem to launch using this method (even after installing Oracles JAVA tools). For these programs you should use the terminal command shared above. If you are logged in as an Administrator you do not need to copy the program to the Desktop. If you do execute as admin the command would read:

sudo xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine /Applications/yEd*

type your administrator password when prompted. Also note you can type the first part of this command and rather than typing the program name you can drag and drop the application file over the Terminal window and Terminal will type the path for you.