Clotho is now a functioning project on common-lisp.net. Clotho 0.1 is available and it builds and runs, but it's obviously very spartan in its current form. It seems appropriate to discuss what to do to it next to evolve it toward being a good Lisp development environment for Mac OS X.
Here are my Top 5 desiderata for Clotho. Feel free to debate the merits of these, or the approaches I suggest for carrying them out, or to add other things you'd like to see.
1. Editor Clotho presently has only a very rudimentary editor, and only in its Listener window. It would be fairly straightforward to splice in the plain-text editor from Alpaca, which would have the advantages of being quick and easy, and of providing the same Emacs-like key-binding API that Alpaca uses. I could probably do that in an afternoon, but before I do, I'm going to have a bash at splicing in Portable Hemlock. I have Gary's sources from the OpenMCL bleeding-edge branch and have had a look through them. Gary accomplished the initial task of building hemlock without X11, and has wired it up to act as a text-storage layer in place of the normal Cocoa text storage. I can't use his sources unchanged because they rely on some of the new Objective C/CLOS work he and Randall Beers are doing for the next release, but I'm not discouraged; there isn't all that much code. I expect I'll experiment with it some time soon and decide whether it's better to wait for the next OpenMCL release or go ahead and try building a Hemlock-based editor into Clotho now.
2. Inspector Another obvious choice would be to work on splicing Hamilton Link's windowing inspector into Clotho. That also shouldn't take too long, and I think it's a good idea. I expect I'll do it soon if someone else doesn't.
3. Resource Manager As I've mentioned before, I'd like to see a few tools in Clotho that can read and write nibfiles, because of their importance in the Cocoa programming world. I'd like to see more tools than that, actually; one of the projects I worked on at Apple, SK8, extended MCL to provide fairly impressive viewers and editors for images, movies, sounds, and so on. Resource viewers and editors are a lot of work, so II sort of expect tools like this to be an ongoing project.
4. Debugger Clearly it's desirable to have a stepper and a debugger that can control breakpoints and display and edit stack frames in a nice way.
5. Application Builder The way things are right now you could use Clotho+Emacs to build a working application in about the same way I used Bosco+Emacs to build Clotho. That's kind of crude and not especially Lispy, though. Better would be if you could launch Clotho, write a bunch of Lisp code, and then ask Clotho to make a new application bundle with all the right resource files in the bundle. Then you could build your Whizzy app in Clotho, ask CClotho to save Whizzy.app and, abracadabra! you would have a new application ready to launch. That involves writing some code to make the application bundle, to get names and other strings from the user somehow and write them into the plist files, and so on.
--me