Preface
Everyone you know has a smart mobile device of some kind. You probably own several too! The general idea of having utility applications on a phone is not new. Even cell phone and PDA games have existed for years, but the way that iPhone used touch instead of a stylus or keyboard and the way it used gestures to reduce the number of steps to do something was a game changer.
iPhone was released in June 2007 and the Android OS was released in September 2008. If you wanted to create something that worked on both platforms, you'd had to learn two development environments and languages: Objective-C for iPhone and Java for Android.
In the desktop world, there are several development tools that allow you to publish apps on both Mac and Windows as well as Linux in the case of LiveCode. The most successful of these tools are Adobe Director, Adobe Flash, Unity, and LiveCode. Publishing apps to iOS was introduced with Adobe Director 12, which means that all four tools are also suitable for mobile development.
These tools have different strengths; in some cases, the strengths relate to the nature of the applications you can make and in other cases, they relate to how accessible the tool is to people who are not hardcode programmers. If you want to make a high-quality 3D game, Unity would be the best choice, with Director and then Flash as other choices. If you need a lot of character animations, Flash would be the best choice, Adobe Director being a good alternate.
If the most important thing for you is how approachable the tool is, then LiveCode wins easily. It's also a valid choice to make the majority of apps you might wish to make. In fact, for apps that are a set of single screens, as would be the case for most utility apps as well as board and puzzle games, LiveCode is better suited than other tools. It also has better access to native interface elements; with the other tools, you usually have to create graphics that resemble the look of native iOS and Android controls instead of accessing the real thing.
With its easy-to-use near-English programming language and the stack of cards metaphor, LiveCode lets you concentrate more on creating the app you want to make and less on the technicalities of the development environment.
