Prototype kit extensions, small checkboxes and radio buttons, multi-select autocomplete

So last week I missed doing my weeknotes so I’m going to combine the last two weeks together. But I do have the best excuse—much better than the dog ate my homework.

I lost my vision

My 18 month old baby girl poked my out so badly that I couldn’t see out of my one good eye.

My bad eye has been bad all my life as I have Daune Retraction Syndrome.

And while there is never a good time to get your eye fucked by your baby daughter, I had to spend the entire next day visiting two eye hospitals instead of being there to help out, at ya know, my boys 5th birthday party.

Why 2 hospitals? Because the first place, after a 4 hour wait, said to me that I just needed glasses. They couldn’t see a scratch on my cornea. They said I was just going mad that for the past umpteen years I could see. And the meer fact that Talia poked my eye out triggered me to become acutely aware of how I can’t see anymore.

Fuck that doctor.

I got home at 2pm and decided to trek all the way back into London for a second opinion. This time they found a scratch. I celebrated like a premier league footballer. The nurse thought I was a lunatic and has never seen anyone celebrate the news of a corneal abrasion.

So she’s my hero for the week.

My vision is healing nicely. Thank fuck, because I was pretty very worried.

Recreated the GOV.UK Design System’s form components in Angular

As I’ve been writing about in past weeknotes, this work is all done. We finally have Angular versions of the wonderful GOV.UK Design System form components. Big thanks to Franco.

I wrote a little note of appreciation to Franco in his copy of Form Design Patterns haha.

Sent out a newsletter

I mentioned in my last weeknotes that I haven’t sent out newsletter in a while. Sorted that out nicely by sending out a case study about the HMCTS Design System.

And the best bit is that someone from Ofgem replied to me declaring an interest in one of the components. Cool.

GOV.UK Prototype Kit extensions

Matt Carey, from HMRC has made the GOV.UK Prototype Kit even better by allowing third parties to create extensions for it.

For example, by adding a single config file into the root of the HMCTS Frontend package, a simple npm install @hmcts/frontend --save is all that’s needed for people to use it in the GOV.UK Prototype Kit.

We’ve had a few teething problems and we’ve raised some issues. Thanks to Joe Lanman, the lead designer on the prototype kit who’s helped get it setup my end.

Small checkboxes and radios

The GOV.UK Design System now has small radios and checkboxes. It’s great work and I upgraded the HMCTS Design System’s filter component to use them. They look a lot better.

Multi-select autocompletes

The accessible, single-select autocomplete component I created for Form Design Patterns was one of the hardest things I’ve ever built.

So I can imagine that a multi-select autocomplete is even harder to build. To my fortune, this topic came up in the friday x-government design system call last week.

Read more about the solution GOV.UK ended up using in Accessibility lessons: dealing with a large amount of form inputs. And you can see them in action here.

Started writing an article web components

Web components seem to be getting more and more attention. But despite their promise they have a number of drawbacks. So I’m writing about that and hope to share that with you soon.

CSS Tricks article will be published soon

I mentioned in last week’s weeknotes that I’ve submitted an article to CSS Tricks. They like it and the plan is for it to go live early May. Excited.

Things I’d like to read again in the future