Signal Hill launched the Senior Correspondent app, a mobile application available on the iOS and Android app stores, in November of 2014.

The goal of the application is to further the mission of the Senior Correspondent website, to give readers new perspectives on the world via the eyes of our seniors.

The application is divided into three main sections, Explore, Engage and Publish. The Explore tab lets users access all of the existing Senior Correspondent content, as well as highlighted contributions from our users.

The Engage tab is where editors posts Assignments, which are focused topics or areas of interest that we invite our users to respond to.

The Publish tab is where users can add their own stories.

We got started on the project in the beginning of August 2014 with a series of wireframes and design iterations.

Once it came time for development, it was decided that a hybrid application would best suite the needs of the project. Hybrid apps are built with web technologies, but packaged in a native frame. This gives us the benefit of accessing native device APIs and the freedom to re-package the application for different platforms with minimal code changes.

The web portion is built with the Angular front-end framework, and the native portion is packaged using Cordova. The back-end is hosted on Sitemason, where a PHP application serves JSON and adds records to the Sitemason CMS. This allows the editors of Senior Correspondent to access all user accounts and stories via Sitemason, while users only ever see the simplified interface of the application itself.

The application is available now on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.