The angular team finally released a stable Angular Material - I just love these guys. Here's what you need to know...
Material Design is not about CSS Frameworks
Let's start with a wrong idea about Material design - that it's a Bootstrap alternative. This is wrong, because bootstrap (or most CSS solutions) are more like the words and spelling of a language, and Material Design is more like the gramatics. Let me explain:
Bootstrap is a design-system with grids, elements and things like that - focused on making elements consistently look the way you want. So you can define the look of a button, a font and more.
Material design is not about that. It's more like a complete language, which describes how various things should be arranged to make intuitive sense to the user. I really recommend to read the entire Google guide on material design if you were not aware of this. They call it a "unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences".
So like in a language, which tells you how words are arranged to form a question, Material Design tells you how to arrange dialogs and parts of them to handle various interaction scenarios. Here's an example with the FAB (floating action button):
What is Angular Material?
It's a library of styles and components styled in a material-design way, to allow you to efficiently develop applications. This means that it provides components which incorporate the philosophy of Material Design - so that developers will automatically adhere to these practices. This is an extreme productivity boost and ensures consistent, high-quality UIs.
What's Special about Angular Material 5?
Since Angular 2 came out, there has been no official Material Design library to go with it. So we've been waiting for this for over a year! Internally, the Angular team had to wait for various features to mature in Angular, which is why they waited so long.
Is it production ready: since it just came out, we don't know yet. But the approach they took with waiting to release it till everything matched feels good. We (2sic) will start using this within the next few days!
Thanks Angular Guys - we Love You!
Best wishes from Switzerland,
Daniel