Crosswind

While on vacation with my parents earlier this year, my father, the airline pilot, asked me to make him an app. Often when he’s coming in for a landing he wants to know the crosswind on the runway. He knows the runway heading, he knows the wind heading and speed, he knows he has robust tools in his fight kit to do the calculations. But all he really wants to know is if the crosswind is close enough to the plane’s crosswind rating to worry about it. He wants an estimate, he wants it quick, and he wants to get on with the landing.

So I built Crosswind.

Crosswind is a single-purpose Windows Phone app that can take three inputs, do a sine for the result, and get out of the way. It was designed to be simple, beautiful, and (most of all) fast.

Crosswind Main Page

Though I receive my commission at the end of May, I didn’t start work on Crosswind until the beginning of August during the Summer 2014 SEP Startup Weekend. It wasn’t until this last week that I had an opportunity to finish it up and publish it. I have probably put 40 hours into it so far and though there are still several changes I’d like to make to the code, it is published and live on the Windows Phone app store. It is my first mobile app.

While working on the app I found a couple of very awesome sites. RGB.to is a great resource for converting colors between different formats. e.g. hex to HSL. It even supports HTML color names (which Windows Phone also uses). The other is ModernUIIcons.com, an large, high-quality, free icon pack that really embraces the Windows Phone aesthetic. I will certainly be using more of those icons in the future.

And now, the link you’ve all been waiting for: check out “Crosswind” in the Windows Phone Store! http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/crosswind/285e269d-0574-46ac-97e7-7f5386d154b2

Windows Phone Store link

This one’s for you, Dad.


  • Known to apply to:
  • Windows Phone 8
  • Windows Phone 8.1