Deckhand

Deckhand 1.3: a fifteen second demo, comparison pages, and a prompt for your LLM

Three days after 1.0, a release about explaining rather than adding. What changed on the site and in the binary, and how to update.

The first feedback after the launch was not about features. It was "I don't get what it does" and "how is it different from reveal.js?". Fair. So 1.3 is a release about explaining, with one fix in 1.3.1 that the release pipeline forced on me.

The demo, in fifteen seconds

The landing page now opens on a screen recording of the three screens: the stage on the left, the remote on a phone, the audience view on the right, with the laser and the QR code in action. No mock-up, the real thing, served by the hub itself (/static/site/demo.mp4, with Range support so Safari plays it). The same recording is a GIF in the README.

Deckhand versus the others

Three honest pages, with a table and a "where each one is the better pick" section: reveal.js, Slidev and Google Slides, plus an overview. Short version: they make slides, Deckhand presents the HTML you already have. If you need themes, plugins and PDF export, reveal.js is the better tool. If you need to present a folder from any screen with your phone in your hand, that is Deckhand.

A prompt for your language model

Most of my decks are generated. So here is the prompt that makes any model produce a folder that passes deckhand validate on the first try: one file per slide, the naming, the deck.json, the rules on scripts and assets. Paste it, describe your talk, present.

Under the hood

  • /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt; docs, changelog and comparison pages carry a description, a canonical URL and Open Graph tags, so they can be indexed and shared with a proper preview. App pages and live screens stay out of search engines.
  • 1.3.1: the changelog is now embedded from the repository root. The CI, goreleaser and Homebrew builds never copied it, so their binaries answered 404 on /changelog and the release pipeline failed on that very test. Fixed, with a test that checks the exact robots tag instead of the word "noindex" (which the changelog text itself contains).

Updating

brew upgrade deckhand            # Homebrew
deckhand version                 # should say 1.3.1

Or grab the binary for your platform in the releases. Self-hosted hubs: bump the image tag and docker compose up -d, migrations run at start.

Full details in the changelog.

Gilles Fauvie, who makes Deckhand. Questions and remarks: hello@deckhand.app.