Hello Synfig People! I am quite new here, and I don´t understand why there is no mac version to download? When there is a bug in it, is it so bad to completely put it down? What happens if someone installs an old version for mac, which can be found on the internet? Will the system crash down or will the prog not start? I would like to download the software for my pc but I am afraid it will crash down the system because there is this sentence on the topic of the download page: “There are security issues with the dv, imagemagick and ffmpeg targets on Windows, please avoid them”. I don´t understand the sentence, my English isn´t good enough. Security issues doesn´t sound too good…And how can I avoid them? Is it easy to avoid them? So ok, thank you very much! I watched videos of your animations, and some were very impressive!
Keep on your work. And thank you for spending your sparetime on the software.
It is so easy to avoid those targets. Just don’t select then from the drop down menu at the render dialog. Also don’t set it “auto” if you specify “avi”, “dv” or “gif” extension to your output. Those are the default extensions to the ffmpeg, dv, and imagemagick targets. I’m not windows users but I guess is that those targets are not built in in synfig (they call an external application) and maybe there are security issues with them.
Regarding to Mac users there are a couple of ways to install mac version. One is use fink and other is compile by your self. Yes, it is a pain, but we don’t have mac package maintainer. Do you want to help on that? 
-G
Lots of folks (see the bug linked on the Download page) have volunteered to make Mac packages, but no-one has yet stepped up and actually done anything. There are detailed docs about building on mac though (even building native without the need for an X server), genete linked to that. If anyone wants to give me a Mac, I could probably spend a bit of time on this before the next release. I say give rather than lend because I’d need to do it for every release in the future until I get bored of doing it, then I could send it to someone else.
The security issues are that if you are given files from someone else and you render them using those targets, they may cause synfig to run arbitrary programs (including malicious ones like formatting your hard drive). Currently the only way to avoid them is to not use the targets on untrusted sif/sifz files, or switch to Linux or Mac. The issues are due to the use of the popen/system calls, which run the encodedv, convert and ffmpeg command-line programs. I wasn’t able to find a way to fix the issues (patches welcome) because of the way Windows does command-line arguments - one big string parsed by the application instead of one string per command-line argument. The issues are with special chars, the alphanumeric ones and spaces/tabs should be safe. Specific issues include:
dv/imagemagick: render output filenames with special characters
ffmpeg: sif files that import filenames with special chars (only way to check is to look with a text editor before loading)
ffmpeg: sif files that have a document name with special chars (see Edit->Properties->Name)
ffmpeg: render output filenames with special characters
These are ONLY an issue if you have the convert (imagemagick), encodedv (dv) or ffmpeg binaries installed and in your PATH environment variable or in the same dir as synfig.exe/synfigstudio.exe. Most people will not have them installed or will not have them in a place where they can be run. You would need to explicitly set them up for execution, unless their installers do that for you.
I’ve added this security stuff to a page now linked from the download page: