Datastax DevCenter freezes on startup

Just installed (copied over the app from the downloaded dmg) DevCenter 1.6 on my mac, running macOs Sierra 10.12.6 with jdk 8u152 installed. The application loads a UI (splash screen then a couple of checkboxes in a window for getting started) but the UI is frozen (with the splash screen still there). No response to mouse clicks or keyboard. Also can't click on the app name in the menu bar. The app however is not labeled "Not responding" by activity monitor.

So far I've tried -

1. Looking at the logs both in the app folder and in ~/.devcenter. Nothing fishy there
2. Running the app from a different user account - same issue there
3. Deleting all datastax and devcenter related files (searched by name) on my machine and fresh start - still the same issue

any ideas what I could do here?

I was running DevCenter on a previous mac with the same config / os version but a slightly older JDK, never had issues then.

On OSX, you can specify which version of Java DevCenter uses so that you do not need to downgrade your global Java version.

• Right-click on Devcenter.app
• Click "show package contents"
• Open Contents/info.plist
• At the bottom of the file, there's an Eclipse key with lines commented out explaining how to specify the version of Java. Uncomment the line and specify the version of Java that you want DevCenter to use.
• Save & Re-launch DevCenter

The updated info.plist file should look something like this:

<key>Eclipse</key>

    <array>
            <string>-vm</string><string>/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java</string>
    </array>