I'm finding more and more that I just want to use JUCE to build apps, and be done with the platform wars entirely. It has pretty much everything I need in terms of UI elements, and it is so well laid out as a framework that I can almost just guess at things without having to do a lot of scurrying around to find docs and things.
Definitely worth a look if you just want to build clean, efficient, platform-agnostic code that will run everywhere and be performant to boot. Plus, you have native integration for almost everything, and best of all: you don't have to use the repugnant mess of web abstractions to build something cool.
I mean, I've made 50x what I invested in JUCE already, and its only been a year of development .. but yeah, I guess it is pretty expensive when you are just getting started. Still, the Personal Use -> Indie step is an attainable one, and it shouldn't be terribly difficult to recover the cost relatively quickly once you come up with something, built with the Personal license, that might finally be qualified for an Indie release.
Definitely worth a look if you just want to build clean, efficient, platform-agnostic code that will run everywhere and be performant to boot. Plus, you have native integration for almost everything, and best of all: you don't have to use the repugnant mess of web abstractions to build something cool.
http://juce.com/
EDIT: Plus, you get to learn how to build apps in the 21st century: through CI and automated builds, like Cthulhu intended.