Operating Systems

I am creating an app called South Campus Congestion—where GPS’s will be installed on all busses. The app will generate the best times for students to take the bus to and from campus to avoid congestion. Every time a student takes the bus, they will essentially “check in” thus alerting other students when a bus is at capacity.

There are many different popular operating systems like Microsoft by Bill Gates, Apple by Steve Jobs and Unix created by Kent Thompson. In my experience with information technology thus far, I found Microsoft to be the best operating systems for many of the programs we have to use. For my app, South Campus Congestion this stand alone operating system would be great because it works well on desktops, laptops computers and mobile computing devices. This will allow users to access the application on any computing device they prefer.

However, I realize that the popularity of the iPhone has skyrocketed and many people, even on our own campus owns one. It now directly competes with the Android. When developing this application I would feel safer as a developer that it is on the Apple network because I know its safe for my users. If I was to expose the app to the Droid market, it can be altered and it will not determine how effective it is due to lack of security. The other problem that Apple has is it does no use Flash like Droid, the most common program people know.

As far as loading my application to the Internet as an open source, I would not do this either for the simple fact it is restricted to the SU community. If I was to load it to the Internet as an open source this means the source code is open for everyone to use, modify, and redistribute. I do not want to subject my users to the vulnerability of others finding out their information, so this would not work for my app.