>I suspect this is because I'm missing the JDBC driver, because connecting to the same db, through Hana Studio installed on windows works without any problems
No the Studio installer is completely self contained and doesn't rely upon an external JDBC driver or HANA Client installation. It all gets installed via the Studio link provided.
>Additionally I would like the driver so that i could connect to Hana through java code, which at the moment I can't do on OSX, as it complains about this missing driver.
SAP no longer redistributes the HANA Client as part of the Developer Edition license.