Scand L
td. is now 11 years old – quite grown-up and independent, having achieved professional success, yet extremely curious, open-minded and willing to upgrade itself and develop!
Many happy returns of the day, Scand!
Visualizing things you want to explain is now possible and can be done remotely. We’ll explain, why: we have submitted our SkyRemote app to the newly-opened Skype App Directory!
SkyRemote is just the first fruit and we have chosen it for one simple reason: it is a sure-fire solution for a wide range of users who need to share their desktops with other users on their contact list!
Desktop sharing with SkyRemote is secure, free and easy. Multiple desktop sharing, controlling a remote desktop, recording sessions to AVI files, remote clipboard access – these are just some of the killer features provided by this app.
The requirement are as follows:
The app is well-documented: you can find a detailed manual and make use of the integrated help file.
Check out Skype App Directory for our new Skype app soon!
June 27, 2011
Graeme Rocher, the Grails Project Lead announced the team’s decision to change Grails 1.4 to Grails 2.0. The explanation is a long list of new features and a different look & feel that we are going to see quite soon – these are the main reasons why the next version of the framework will be presented as Grails 2.0.
We are really looking forward to the new release to be able to enjoy a bunch of the announced features, including new console UI and interactive mode, enhanced performance, HTML5 scaffolding and a number of other amazing things promised in the next milestone, along with a “pretty painless (c)” upgrade from 1.3.x.
As the title suggests, the First Scand Small Chinese Table Soccer Championship (SCTS) entered its final stage – glorifying the winners.
Our heartily congratulations to Sergey Tkachuk, the Champion, and Ivan Staskov, the Finalist!
The winners are awarded with special Scand T-shirts, cordial “hurrah!” and lengthy ovation by their colleagues. We are all looking forward to the next Scand SCTS Championship and will surely let you know once it starts! 
As the title suggests, the First Scand Small Chinese Table Soccer Championship (SCTS) entered its final stage – glorifying the Champions.
Our heartily congratulations to Sergey Tkachuk, the Champion, and Ivan Staskov, the Finalist!
The winners were awarded with special Scand T-shirts and cordial “hurrah!” produced by their colleagues.
Our colleague Alexey Sergeev is back from the GR8Conf that took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 17-19, 2011. The conference is an international event in the world of Groovy, Grails, Griffon and other GR8 technologies and attracts hundreds of software developers, architects, tech leads, start-uppers and other interested IT professionals annually.
For a company that has been intensively using the Groovy dynamic language and the Grails framework for several years (as we have), participating in the GR8conf was a good idea.
Workshops and hands-on training, round tables and discussing genuine case studies, socializing with industry peers, getting to know the latest technology updates and advancing to a higher professional level – all these opportunities were offered by the conference hosted by the IT University of Copenhagen.
The agenda enabled 
the participants to learn directly from the experts in the field and technology creators and share their professional experience with the other attendees.
Among the speakers delivering their presentations during the 3 conference days there were such gurus as Gillaume Laforge, speaking about the new Groovy 1.8 features and making Groovy 1.9 forecasts, Dierk König, making a presentation on Grails UIs, Burt Beckwith giving a talk about Grails plug-ins and many other GR8 tech evangelists and experts. Every hour of the conference induced dozens of tweets written by the participants.
The impressions and knowledge obtained during the conference were summarized into a presentation and shared with other Scand developers and architects applying Groovy and Grails.
May 19-20, 2011
SEF.BY is an international IT event held in Minsk annually. This year it attracted more than 450 professionals belonging to such spheres as software design and development, project management, software engineering technologies and methodologies, IT human resources management.
Software development gurus from Belarus, the USA and the European countries presented more than 50 reports, organized a number of workshops and round-table discussions.
The topics discussed were divided into several main blocks – software development business, project management and software engineering – and included numerous aspects of project management, specific features of business processes and business models, customer relationships with regard to information systems deployment, fixed price projects management, IT companies development and certification, Amazon Web Services, testing automation opportunities, Agile projects, using Scrum and many more.
Scand Java team upgraded to Groovy 1.8 once the release was announced on April 27, 2011.
Increased productivity and speed, enhanced runtime performance, improved functional programming style and syntax and less errors – these are just some of the advantages we appreciated since we have transferred to the the new release. We also enjoy the possibility to write a much wider range of DSLs, the ability to use closures as annotation parameters, command chain and other performant features.
April 25, 2011 – Scand development team members built a patch for Apache Batik 1.7.
Batik is a Java-based toolkit for applications or applets dealing with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content. With the Batik toolkit you can easily use SVG images for various purposes, including generation, manipulation or display.
The misfeature found by our SVG experts was the lack of radial gradient support in the svggen component. The corresponding feature was added and the results were sent to the Apache Batik team.
Clouds - the fun, the rock!
Indeed, clouds are admirable! No datacenters, no power supply needed, and nothing but Internet required.
Sure, we use clouds frequently as demo platforms for our customers, also for quick testing of untypical environment, and for development (for example in case of additional build servers providing customers with direct access to nightly builds).
Yep, we’re touched a bit with the latest Amazon EC2 disaster, but nothing critical. We also use Rackspace and GoogleApps, so we’re now prepared for new Skynet attacks 
Phone/Fax: +375 (17) 256-07-76
E-mail: contact@scand.com
New Plugins for Omeka
April 28, 2011
Everybody interested in Web content and collections management, building and sharing educational systems or archival systems is welcome!
Scand has announced the release of Comments and DownloadLogger plugins for Omeka – an open source web-publishing platform used by archivists, librarians, museum experts, educators and just anybody wishing to publish and share their collections and exhibit objects online.
The Comments plugin is intended for adding an opinion about any publicly available and published item and rating it.
DownloadLogger handles all download file requests, sets the correct file name and logs download requests in the database. Both our plugins are downloadable and compatible with Omeka version 1.3 or higher.