Mission
To do for CL GUI builders what CLOS did for CLers who want to do OO: give them the best tool extant, regardless of language.
The Spec
Easy, powerful, extensible, lightweight, close to the sand (OS and OpenGL, anyway), and universal across OSes and CL implementations.
Backtrace notwithstanding, Cello now runs on AllegroCL and Lispworks, and under Win32 (both) and Linux (ACL). Check it out:
Lighting Panel/Linux
Next stop, OS X.
Early Cello Screen Shots
These bad boys are made possible through the miracles of OpenGL (in turn made accessible by the legendary Nehe site), FTGL, and ImageMagick, all in turn made portably accessible from Lisp by UFFI. Think you can do better? Start with these Common Lisp OpenGL and Glut bindings.
The Lighting Panel
This is something I cobbled together so I could rapidly experiment with different light counts, locations, and parameters. As you will see, there are quite a few parameters. I did best with just one light, perhaps because I know nothing about lighting. The unlabeled box with draggable puck and a vertical slider alongside let you reposition a light. (The vertical slider is for the z-axis.) Some different attempts:
Strike 1! Strike 2! Metallic I'll Give You a Skin
What more could you ask? JPEGs? Rotated text? In three dimensions?
I suppose next you'll want access to any font on your system, in bitmap, pixmap, texture, polygon, extruded polygon, or outline! <sigh> Well, at least there is no danger you will want nested windows where the nested window gets its own OpenGL context for efficiency. Speaking of efficiency, let's do JPEGs again, this time with much faster textures so we can render them in 3D, then really have a skin in which the window texture gets mapped onto buttons: this is the lighting panel again, which I need in order to get the lighting of Cloucell (the graphical object inspector) just rght.
Watch comp.lang.lisp or the Cells Project for news of a an early, bleeding edge, not ready for prime time, no whining allowed release.