We started out as slid.es and then bought slides.com. I won’t share the exact amount, but I believe it was 5x our yearly revenue at the time so safe to say it was a big investment. We haven’t raised any money so my co-founder and I had to pay out of pocket.
Hey! I’m the creator of reveal.js. Thanks for sharing. Happy to answer questions if you have any.
reveal.js was first released in 2011. A few years later I also launched a visual editing environment for reveal.js called Slides (slides.com). It has some pretty unique features targeted at developers, like a built-in CSS editor, access to the HTML source, and stepped line-by-line code highlighting. http://slides.com/news/developers
It’s been really great finding a sustainable way to continue working on open source (reveal.js) thanks to the revenue from the proprietary editor (Slides).
Most of it is custom built rather than using a larger JS framework. We do use a whole lot of libraries for specific tasks though, like moment.js for date formatting, Ace for code editing, Spectrum for the color picker.
The old editor will be around for a long time since old presentations can't be opened in the new editor. To create new decks with the old editor, append ?version=1 to the URL: /username/new?version=1
For those of you wondering what we've changed in reveal.js since it was last on HN, have a look at https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/releases (everything since 1.2.0 is new). Changes include support for RTL, MathJax, Multiplexing, Leap Motion and much more.
I'm also working on making reveal.js available to folks who don't know HTML. Give it a go at http://slid.es/
Nah, the presentation framework is open source (http://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js) and we provide an export option that lets you easily get the HTML contents out for migration.
You're right – the intent is to demo the interaction when hovered and I did not spend any time designing the resting states. If this were to be used for something like a gallery thumbnail I think it's perfectly fine to not promote the hover preview at all. Users would discover it naturally as they mouse over to click on the thumbnail.
However if it's important the user discovers what's in the stack, this could be communicated visually like http://cl.ly/image/1c041l2e1S0O