One of the ways "hackers" distribute malware is by tricking you into running software on your computer that you shouldn't be. They package software up to look as much as possible like the real deal, but in the end, they're really installing malware on your system that can cause all kinds of problems. As an answer to this, software developers have started to "sign" their software with a digital signature. This digital signature is tightly controlled and can be verified only by the developer and the Operating System to ensure that the software you're running came from a trusted source. Apple has already had this type of security built into OSX, but in their newest update, Mountain Lion 10.8, they're turning it on by default. With Mountain Lion, by default, when you run software downloaded from the Internet, it will check for the presence of this digital signature and will not allow you to run software that does not have one (this includes both installers and software applications). In OSX, all of this security checking is called GateKeeper.

 

 

 

   Due to the design of the Red Giant installers, we were not able to get them into a format supported by Apple's code signing tools in time for the Mountain Lion launch. Therefore, if you're running Mountain Lion with the default security settings, you need to turn GateKeeper off in order to run our installers. Once you're done installing, you can turn GateKeeper back to its default setting - this limitation is only with our installers. We do, in fact, have all of the digital signatures we need, and all of our software except our installers that needs this signature has been signed. We're just behind on getting the digital signatures embedded into our installers. This is a temporary situation while we work through the details needed in order to make our installers compatible with Apple's code signing. 

 

 

 

   By default, with Gatekeeper on Mountain Lion, if you ran one of our installers, you would just get an error message and would not be able to continue. We wanted to make this a little cleaner while we work on getting our installers signed, so we created a small application (which is code signed!) to help you out with getting your Red Giant products installed.

 

 

 

   In short, we're using an older version of Apple's installer technology called PackageMaker to build our installers. Over time, we have built up a fairly complex build toolchain that allows us to create installers specific to video plugins - it knows all about the various host apps, operating system versions, our own products, and all of the nuances and issues that can arise when working in these environments. We try to make our installers as intelligent as possible to make your experience installing as seamless as possible. So, while it would be nice to think that it's as simple as one of our Engineers clicking a checkbox somewhere saying "sign this installer", we unfortunately have a bit more of an Engineering challenge facing us. We're working on the best possible solution to move our installers to a format supported by Apple's code signing tools. The current workaround of asking you to temporarily disable GateKeeper is just that - temporary.