Software can help streamline the working process but if the idea is shit, no amount of tools will help.

I stumbled upon this quote in a techradar.com article about boosting design efficiency.  It's one that a lot of developers would do well to keep in mind.

Chris Pirillo just released his very cool WicketPixie social media theme for WordPress. He had the theme tweaked and customized for his site, so there's a lot of stuff to muck through in order to get it to work properly. All in all, however, I think this is a very cool theme. Hopefully, I can get all of the customization issues worked through tonight / tomorrow and have this think looking very nice. Kudos to Chris for ponying up his own cash to have the theme developed and then releasing it for free to the world.

Update: After twiddling with some pesky CSS, I'm mostly done with the design. There are a few things I'll tweak in the near term, but, for the most part, I'm done.

I have just recently begun to dig in to Flex. As I've been mucking around with its design view, I've come to the conclusion that it might be the best UI wire framing tool I've seen or used. Its boasts an impressive list of components, most of which can be easily scripted by even a non-programmer. I mocked up an interface in Photoshop this week in about 3 hours. I then mocked up the same interface in Flex in under an hour. I then populated some of the menus and fields with dummy data and even threw in a functional login for extra measure. I think I've found my new favorite tool for mocking up UI. Has anyone else used Flex for wire framing? Does anyone know of anything with a more complete list of UI components?