Forcing Mac Mavericks to Launch a Viewer

[Bill Longabaugh]

Apple (and Oracle) are making it increasingly difficult to launch the Java WebStart BioTapestry Viewer, such as the one that is used to share the online sea urchin endomesoderm model (http://sugp.caltech.edu/endomes/index.html). It turns out that as of patch 51 of Java 7 a few months ago, the sandboxed Viewer application (i.e. it does not ask for any special security privileges) needs to be signed with a security certificate anyway to get it launched with the minimum of hassles. So the sea urchin viewer has been signed, and it works well on Linux and Windows. However, Apple has decided that unless you buy a signing certificate from them, they will not allow your application to cleanly launch without jumping through some obscure hoops, unless you take the unwise step of reducing the security level. So this posting shows that sequence of hoops.

You can still launch the signed viewer with relative ease, as long as you first launch "System Preferences", and then choose the Security and Privacy Panel. Then, as the attached sequence of screen shots show (going 1-4), you can click on the BioTapestry launch link, then acknowledge that you will not be allowed to run it (Pic 1). But as soon as you click on the OK, the Security and Privacy panel will pop up a message that gives you the opportunity to open it anyway (Pic 2). Click on that button, then acknowledge the usual warning about internet applications (Pic 3), and the Viewer will launch (Pic 4).

This hassle will go away when we finish BioTapestry Version 7, which will support a browser-only HTML5 Canvas version of the Viewer. Until then, there is this workaround.

Thanks,

Bill