Perhaps a decade ago, I was roped into maintaining Palm apps written in VB and deployed with AppForge (http://www.techrepublic.com/article/appforge-palm-developmen...).

In a sense, tools like these were the precursors of today's mobile cross-compilers and cross-platform development environments (e.g. Unity).

Okay. Wow. That actually is pretty cool for the time. It came after I had stopped playing around with palm dev (1999).