I want to use ionic with material design. I am stuck between using ionic directives with custom CSS and angular-material
I have read that using ionic directives we get lot of efficient features like
App data is remembered with UI-router, even after navigating to other view and coming back to the page
Ionic list items are rendered only up to display height and reused when scrolling down or up
and a lot of performance improvements.
But, if I use ionic directives they don't have the material design.
If I use angular-material I will not have these performance improvements, and extra features needed for a mobile application.
Angular-material directives are like
<md-list>
<md-item ng-repeat="item in items">
Hello, {{item}}!
</md-item>
</md-list>
Ionic directives are like
<ion-list>
<ion-item ng-repeat="item in items">
Hello, {{item}}!
</ion-item>
</ion-list>
Looks like Ionic is funding angular-material project development, then why is angular-material not compatible to use with ionic?
How can I use angular-material components without losing the performance improvements and features of ionic?
OR
is there a better idea for using material design with ionic?
I found a material design CSS framework known as Materializecss. It looks promising. It's just plain CSS and javascript framework.
Advantages over other frameworks
This page http://materializecss.com/getting-started.html will show you how to include it in your projects.
I hope this helps for any of you searching for a good material design framework.
UPDATE: 2015-07-09
I Found another lightweight powerful beautiful CSS framework for material design
Material Design Light http://www.getmdl.io/
It is lightweight, has smooth and quick animations, looking pretty good. It was made by one of the Google developers. It is officially promoted by google https://developers.google.com/web/. It is getting quite popular, try it. Comparision with Angular Material
UPDATE: 2015-10-23
It's Official, You can watch Ionic2 demo in AngularConnect, It has Material Design as default for Android. We don't need to worry about choosing a Material Design framework.
There is a fairly new project called Ionic Material.
I've tried it out and it works pretty well, but be advised that it is still in "Pre-Release Preview" mode.
According to the github repo it should enter Alpha in April 2015.
It can be installed with bower
bower install ionic-material
That's pretty much all you need to do, but be warned, there are bugs and the documentation is basically non-existent.
Good luck!
Ionic Material and Ionic Material Design Lite are two budding new libraries that aim to be an extension of ionic framework. Though a little immature, works well with ionic components and supports the material theming well.
This probably could give more of an insight.