SYN Retirement

After nearly 20 years of use, and 3 years of announced deprecation, we have finally removed the SYN tool (Synoptic Editor) from the current release.

We will henceforth focus our efforts on the new MIM editor & animator, based on QML.

The reasons for this change of approach are:

• Vector editing in SYN was usable but in no way competitive with, or comparable to excellent COTS editors such as Visio, or Inkscape.
• For accurate pictures of or schematics of actual spacecraft diagrams, we can provide much more pleasant and impressive results by scanning & manipulating the original satellite documentation. However, SYN had very significant code size merely to support a somewhat inferior editing experience.
• It would not be possible to integrate SYN diagrams in other forms of UI, such as the PAR history viewer, or Web UI’s. This is possible when the picture editing tool is based on QML.