[zafriedman]

The awesomeness in my opinion is that a) this took me literally five minutes which means that I had to write absolutely none of my own CSS classes for mobile prototyping, the wonderful guys who developed Ratchet did that for me already! Also, Ratchet is not an MVC framework, it's a front-end iPhone targeted mobile prototyping framework. It allows you to prototype a mobile UI with HTML/CSS/JS faster than prototyping in native Objective-C. At first glance, I honestly think these guys are being humble by calling it a prototyping framework. I could see myself using this for mobile web versions of my apps, although that does presuppose that everything "works" pretty closely to the level one would expect it to reading the docs on their homepage. Check out the link I posted in another comment, you might be confusing Ratchet with something else.

[adrianpike]

Interesting, so how is it different from something like jQuery mobile?

[zafriedman]

I think it really comes down to a matter of preference. This looks interesting to me, and it caught my eye when I saw it on Hacker News much in the same way Meteor did when it came out. For me personally, it just passed the initial smell test really well.

In terms of some concrete attributes which I like, I think it probably is the best framework I've seen in terms of the general aesthetic. I have high hopes that it will allow me to create most of the view elements I'd need to prototype in an incredibly short period of time. I haven't used jQuery mobile for some time now (> 1 year) yet it seems like there are more CSS classes in Ratchet that mimic the iOS look and feel well enough that one could develop a full iOS app prototype in a day or less. If I remember correctly from using jQuery mobile, there was a bit more code to write, and the general look just didn't feel as good to me.