I'm in love with material design. Google spent A LOT of time designing it and focus group testing it. The idea is that everything is supposed to be obvious / apparent in how to use it. If you've used the gmail app on a smartphone, you immediately feel comfortable in any material design app.
I also think it's an improvement but I wouldn't call it "huge". My biggest problem so far was the lack of "support". By that I mean that a simple to medium difficulty Flat Design project does not require a lot of transitions/animations work. This in turn means that the development time is kept relatively low. In contrast, Material Design emphasizes these visual features.
In my opinion, this framework is the missing piece for MD. I only wished that Google had thought of that and helped speed up the development process.
It's just my opinion, but I still think it's a huge improvement. The oversimplification of flat design sort of put it in an "uncanny valley" of sorts for user interfaces, in my experience. I'd look at a UI and really have to ask myself whether I should be able to click on an element or not.
Yup. Those shadows. The garish colors. Too much animation for animations's sake. Un-necessary ornament (e.g. waves on click). Weird negative spacing. Weird proportions on desktop. Use of mobile "logic" everywhere: how is a tiny hamburger bar ever a good solution on desktop when you could easily display the menu the whole time? Those shadows.
I think the Material Design spec will evolve but the design principles are sound and the paper metaphor is useful. With MUI I tried to focus on the core elements and leave the more stylized design decisions up to the app designer.
This would be better implemented via mixins. Eg, the a element has the class 'download-button', which has all the additional visual elements mixed in via sass/less/stylus. There's a small overhead in file size, but it allows you to keep all the visual settings in a single place (the stylesheet) rather than two (the stylesheet and the HTML).
You can use mixins from the source SASS files to do most of this. I was thinking about formalizing it and including it in the documentation but I wanted to get some feedback first.
Every time I see a link to this I can't help but show my age and think of "Magic User Interface" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_User_Interface) for the Amiga. Which might possibly be older than the person who created this MUI.
(If you really want a blast from the past have a look at its old homepage: http://www.sasg.com/mui/)
Down in the Features section the stars marking each li item render horribly in the latest chrome on my desktop and on an android tablet. While not a real reason not to try MUI, it is an annoying distraction for a frontend framework's website.
