I’m very keen to discuss new software engineering and/or technical writing positions, particularly those in the embedded or macOS development arenas. Contact me via any of the platforms linked at the top right of this page.
Until recently, I was a Senior Software Engineer with IoT communications company Kore Wireless for its Device Builder division. Previously, I spent three years as a Developer Educator at Twilio and six as Senior Tech Writer at IoT platform-as-a-service company Electric Imp, which Twilio acquired in 2020.
Before all that, I was a technology journalist, 15 out of 25 years spent in senior roles on the website The Register. I have also contributed to a wide array of publications and news organisations, including The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, the BBC and CNN. You can view samples of my work for these and other publications in my portfolio.
This site is dedicated to my own open source commercial and non-commercial programming projects. If you’re looking for my blog posts, you’ll find them at Smittytone Messes with Micros. Curious about the logo fonts? Then read about them here.
An iPhone and iPad app that lets you install high-quality open-licence fonts.
New Version
Updated 12 November 2024
An app that provides QuickLook support for source code files under macOS Catalina and above.
Updated 14 September 2024
A command line tool that combines multiple JPEG images into a single PDF file, or extracts images from PDF files.
Updated 13 September 2024
An app that provides QuickLook support for Markdown files under macOS Catalina and above.
Updated 07 September 2024
An app that provides QuickLook support for textual files under macOS Catalina and above.
Updated 03 September 2024
A Swift wrapper for the popular Highlight.js syntax highlighter.
Updated 30 August 2024
An app that provides QuickLook support for JSON files under macOS Catalina and above.
Updated 30 August 2024
An app that provides QuickLook support for YAML files under macOS Catalina and above.
Updated 30 August 2024
A customisable menu bar utility that provides easy access to macOS features and scripts you use every day.
Updated 30 April 2024
A Fighting Fantasy character generator and game manager written in Swift.
Updated 30 November 2023
A command line tool for batch-processing — crop, scale, pad, reformat — image files.
Updated 10 August 2023
Multi-bus adaptor firmware, plus client apps and libraries for macOS and Linux.
Updated 23 April 2023
A macOS command line tool to reveal files’ Uniform Type Identifiers (UTIs).
Updated 23 July 2021
Icon design tool for 8x8 matrix LED-based electronics projects.
Updated 09 December 2020
A macOS port of a 1982 real-time RPG in true Commodore PET style.
Updated 24 November 2020
A development tool to manage application code and library files for projects based on the Electric Imp IoT Platform.
Updated 18 November 2020
RP2040 FreeRTOS Template 1.5.0
Templates and demos for FreeRTOS on the Pico’s RP2040 microcontroller.
Updated 06 August 2024
Explore a mysterious and dangerous cave to locate a fiendish monster.
Updated 20 August 2023
Multi-bus adaptor firmware, plus client apps and libraries for macOS and Linux.
Updated 23 April 2023
Sample code and demos for ARM assembly programs written for the Pico’s RP2040 MCU.
Updated 10 July 2022
Retro fast 3D maze shooting action coded in C.
Updated 06 April 2021
A driver library for a range of Holtek HT16K33-based LED displays.
Updated 05 May 2024
A compact clock project written in MicroPython
Updated 24 January 2023
A driver library for Solomon SSD1306-based displays.
Updated 16 September 2022
An assembler/disassembler for the Motorola 6809 8-bit microprocessor.
Updated 02 September 2021
Some Python silliness: 8-bit retro ‘arcade’ action via ncurses...
Updated 07 January 2021
A utility for converting binary files to hex strings.
Updated 31 December 2020
A utility for converting Unicode UTF-8 character codes to hex strings
Updated 12 December 2019
Decode data packets sent to or received by Zigbee-compatible Digi XBee modules.
Updated 09 January 2019