After 15+ years of service, we are preparing to bid our farewell to SYN: synoptic editing and animation package. It has served well our users, but Terma needs to adapt to the changing demands of the market and software landscape. So, our further development efforts will be focused on MIM (mimics) package that allows users to create animated representations of their satellites, subsystems and EGSE facilities in a more modern and streamlined fashion.
MIM is included in both CCS5 and TSC, and we encourage you to check out the chapter “MIM Mimic Editor” in our user manual, vol.1.
We strongly encourage new projects and missions to use MIM editor for new pictures, even if you inherit usable SYN pictures from a previous project. Some reasons to deprecate SYN are:
• Customer feedback that SYN is difficult to use. MIM is much simpler
• SYN is the oldest software in our system
• SYN isn’t flexible enough to integrate in new applications that weren’t foreseen at the time.
By default SYN is already hidden in CCS console, but can – if necessary – be configured via settings to be visible again as follows:
set utope::settings(UserInterface/useSynViewer) true
As a drawing tool, SYN could never compete with COTS tools like Visio or Inkscape. Instead, MIM editor assumes you will have a drawing or image, or prepare one in your preferred drawing tool, and use it as a background. MIM editor then makes the most frequent and simple actions (e.g. linking animated objects to TM parameters) much quicker than SYN.
Of course, ongoing projects that already have significant investment in SYN pictures, can continue using it.
With the next CCS5 release, SYN will be separated from CCS5/TSC into a legacy software installer package, with basic functions left intact.