How did you install the dmg file?
For me I've done the following:
double click on it, it opens up and show Kstars In a new window
drag the Kstars file over to the 'Applications' in Finder, let it unpack/install
head over to 'Applications' and start Kstars

That was exactly what I did.
The volume that gets mounted has a weird name, too:
/Volumes/Applications:KDE:kstars/

When you do it that way it works for you?

I can't remember the name of the volume on the other Mac.
Here's my version, give it a try. drive.google.com/a/dslhome.org/file/d/0B...UEk/view?usp=sharing

edit:
fixed the link permissions, everyone should be able to download the file now.

Also interesting is that your DMG is 56mb, while mine is ~300.

I did get the "untrusted developer" warning that we were wondering about. But it opened.

When I've compiled the first dmg files, it was around 500MB... and thought... mmm that's a large file.
On my third re-intsall of my MBA and rebuilding the all thing, the dmg file is now about 60MB

Compare the content of it V yours.

edit:
I can't even type correctly tonight

I will give that a shot - because we both built everything it will be tough.
I do see that quite a bit of the size difference is the GSC stuff- I am going to disable that and rebuild & emerge to see what that ends up with.

I just got home a few minutes ago and tried Stephane's dmg on my wife's computer. It was very promising!!!

The first problem I had was that your app bundle was created for Sierra and I got a message saying that it requires 10.12 or later. But I started the program from the command line and it worked just fine!! So the first thing to look into is how to indicate which version of OS X the app bundle can actually run on.

Then it started up just fine, and it copied the data directory properly and KStars was working great, hooray!!!

Then I tried to start Ekos, but ran into a problem because the default option for the locations of the indi drivers, xml files, and astrometry files are NOT the bundled ones. I can write some code specific to OS X that will make the default the bundled indiserver and astrometry. This one easily solved.

Then I tried to start the INDI server again, but it couldn't start up because the drivers could not find libusb looking at @rpath/libusb etc.

But this is huge progress!! I didn't install anything on my wife's computer at all.

Yes, the difference appears to be gsc.

I think we need all the instructions from Stephane about getting qt and the libraries properly in the dmg.

Ok, I just got done running through a test of the revisions to the emerge script. I ran it on my own computer. I did not try to build the 3rd party drivers. Everything worked: kstars, the bundled indiserver, and the bundled astrometry. Your changes fixed the broken link problem. Of course, gsc is probably still using the other version installed on my computer because we still haven't set environment variables etc, and xplanet has not been bundled either.

ah GSC, that makes sense, good spot.

thank you, I'm glad it's "almost" working for you also on a Macbook which is not being used for dev stuff.

that @rpath/libusb issue is what I'm trying to fix. I shall post my steps tonight as I forgot to do it yesterday.