yEd can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software

Question

I recently installed yED for Mac (I'm running MacOS Catalina 10.15.1), but everytime I try to open it I get the message:

'yEd can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.This software needs to be updated. Contact the developer for more information'

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Catalina's gatekeeper prevents a normal use of yEd at this time. You can try to bypass gatekeeper by running yEd from command line:

1. Install the latest Java runtime environment on your macOS (unless Java is already installed on your machine, of course). E.g. AdoptOpenJDK offers macOS installers for OpenJDK 13.
2. Download the "Zipped yEd Jar" yEd-3.19.1.1.zip from the yEd download page.
3. Extract the zip archive to a destination of your choice.
4. Open a terminal and start yEd with
     java -jar [path-to-yed]/yed.jar
   where "[path-to-yed]" is the path to the directory extracted from the zip archive in step 3 above (e.g. ~/Documents/yed-3.19.1.1).