Probably the coolest IDE for beginners out there. An object oriented sprite model, icon-based as well as text-based scripting language, lots of facilities for manipulating sprites and images, all available for free.
http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/
While GameMaker might not be suited for application development per se, neither is MicrosoftExcel. I think this points to a genre of software development tools that is ignored by developers who are big on TuringComplete systems: ArtWare. Applications and utilities like PhotoShop, PowerPoint, Excel, etc which let you generate creative and original content rapidly.
(Excel is Turing-complete.)
So is GameMaker, even without using the built-in scripting language.
I suggest use GameMaker4.3 as it is the best version. Don't use 5.0 or newer.
Can you elaborate on that?