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Beginning Visual Studio for Mac: Build Cross-Platform Apps with Xamarin and .NET Core Alessandro Del Sole
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This book is dedicated to my wife, Agnieszka, daughter, Susanna, and son, Xavier, with love. We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.
—Jesse Owens
About the Author
Dawid Borycki is a software engineer, biomedical researcher, and an expert in several Microsoft developer technologies. He has resolved a broad range of software development challenges for device prototypes (mainly medical equipment), embedded device interfacing, and desktop and mobile programming. Dawid regularly speaks at international developers conferences and has published, cited, and presented on numerous developer topics, including web technologies, mobile/crossplatform development, wearables, embedded, and more.
About the Technical Reviewer
Chaim Krause is an expert computer programmer with over thirty years of experience to prove it. He worked as a lead tech support engineer for ISPs as early as 1995 and as a senior developer support engineer with Borland for Delphi, and has worked in Silicon Valley for over a decade in various roles, including technical support engineer and developer support engineer. He is currently a military simulation specialist for the US Army’s Command and General Staff College, working on projects such as developing serious games for use in training exercises. He has also authored several video training courses on Linux topics and has been a technical reviewer for over twenty books, including iOS Code Testing, Android Apps for Absolute Beginners (4th ed.), and XML Essentials for C# and .NET Development (all Apress). It seems only natural then that he would be an avid gamer and have his own electronics lab and server room in his basement. He currently resides in Leavenworth, Kansas, with his loving partner, Ivana, and a menagerie of four-legged companions: their two dogs, Dasher and Minnie, and their three cats, Pudems, Talyn, and Alaska.
Acknowledgments
Dear reader, you hold or view this book thanks to Joan Murray, who was very encouraging of my book proposal and provided a lot of writing tips.
I am grateful to Chaim Krause for providing a very detailed technical review and catching even the smallest mistakes.
Many thanks go to Laura Berendson for reading the manuscript, providing feedback, and giving general advice. I thank Jill Balzano for her patience and keeping track of the book project. I also thank Welmoed Spahr and Todd Green for publishing this book and April Rondeau for copyediting.
Finally, special thanks go to my wife, Agnieszka, daughter, Susanna, and son, Xavier, for their continuous support and patience shown to me during the writing of this book.
Introduction
The programming of mobile apps has recently become one of the most important and exciting aspects of the IT market, leading to numerous applications. At the same time, mobile development is very challenging because of market fragmentation, which is manifested by the presence of devices of different sizes, operating systems, and software development tools. So, to start doing mobile development, you need to take into account these various factors and decide your strategy.
There are three leading mobile platforms: Apple (including iOS, watchOS, and tvOS), Android, and Universal Windows Platform (UWP), each of which provides dedicated tools for developing apps. Each platform has specific hardware requirements. Clearly, iOS SDKs require you to use the local Mac machine or the remote build agent installed on a Mac. UWP apps can be built on Windows 10 machines. Finally, you can use either Mac or Windows machines to develop Android apps. So, first and foremost, the question to answer is that of which hardware to choose. For mobile development, the Intel-based Mac platform is the best choice because it allows you to use macOS and Windows 10 concurrently. The latter can be installed natively through the Boot Camp or virtually using the Parallels Desktop. Accordingly, Mac machines will give you the most flexibility.
After choosing the hardware, you need to select the software development strategy. You have three traditional options here:
• Native apps – In this case, you use platform SDKs, which require you to utilize platform-specific IDEs and programming languages. For instance, in terms of iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, you would need to use either Swift or Objective-C along with Xcode. Native tools give you full access to the platform API at the cost of needing to learn platform-specific programming languages.
• Hybrid apps – They are programmed with web technologies as web pages. These pages are then rendered with a native WebView component, which can be virtually understood as the local web browser, delivered by each platform. In this case, you have a lot of flexibility in terms of programming tools and can use the same code across various platforms at the cost of reduced access to platform-specific APIs.
• Mobile web apps – They are web apps whose views are tailored to mobile devices. Such a strategy is the simplest to apply but does not let you access device components, and it also requires a network connection.
Of course, development strategy is dictated by a number of factors, ranging from your programming preferences to application complexity and target platforms. If you intend to target multiple platforms at the same time, you can choose one of the cross-platform mobile tools, like Xamarin.Forms, Qt Mobile, Embarcadero RAD Studio, or React Native. They provide an additional layer of the unified, platformindependent programming API, which is translated to a platform-specific API during compilation. Importantly, cross-platform instruments provide not only access to the API but also to visual controls. For instance, if you create a message dialog, it will be converted during compilation to the platform-specific message dialog. As a result, in such a “Write once, run anywhere (WORA)” approach, you can indeed compile the same code across various platforms at the cost of flexibility. Finally, if your goal is to extensively utilize platform-specific APIs, you will choose Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android. These let you develop
native apps with C# or F#. Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android provide an additional thin layer that maps C# or F# code onto the native platform API. You typically use Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android to implement logic and design the UI separately for each platform. Although you have the extra work of creating platformspecific UIs, you can still share the platform-independent code between various apps. Such an approach gives you two important advantages:
• Your app is native. So, it looks like any other built-in app, as it utilizes native visual controls.
• Your app is written in modern programming language. As a result, you have easy access to numerous libraries and a wide community. This is especially important when you are C# programmer who wants to start developing mobile apps.
In this book, we will learn how to use Xamarin.iOS to develop apps for Apple devices: iPhone and iPad (iOS), Apple Watch (watchOS), and Apple TV (tvOS). We will first prepare the development tools (Visual Studio for Mac) and will get to know available project templates (Chapter 1). Subsequently, I will explicitly show how Xamarin.iOS is related to the native SDKs delivered by Apple, and we will investigate the app structure and lifecycle (Chapter 2). Then, we will learn how to create views (Chapter 3) and implement navigation between them (Chapter 4). Afterward, we will work with touch gestures (Chapter 5), study how to achieve high-quality apps with automatic testing (Chapter 6), and consume data from RESTful web services (Chapter 7). Finally, we will learn how to develop apps for Apple Watches (Chapter 8) and Apple TVs (Chapter 9).
In this book, however, we will not learn how to reuse code between various platforms nor how to develop WORA apps with Xamarin.Forms. You can find more information about this in this book Beginning Visual Studio for Mac: Build Cross-Platform Apps with Xamarin and .NET Core by Alessandro Del Sole.
CHAPTER 1
Fundamentals
In this chapter, I will guide you through the installation of the development tools you will need for this book. Specifically, we will install Visual Studio for Mac as well as Xcode. The latter is the native toolset for Mac developers. It delivers IDE, SDKs, and also the device simulators we will use. If you have these tools already installed, you can skip to the subsequent section.
After ensuring that all tools are ready, we will create the first Xamarin.iOS app for the iPhone and iPad. This app, shown in Figure 1-1, displays various alerts and responds to user actions. I will also discuss the available project templates that are delivered by Visual Studio. The same templates are available in Xcode, so Xamarin.iOS and Visual Studio let you access iOS platform–specific programming interfaces in a way similar to native development tools but with the ease and smoothness provided by the C# programming language. In this chapter, I will also discuss the basic aspects of designing user interfaces in Visual Studio and show you how to associate event handlers with events fired by visual controls.
■ Note In this chapter, I will not discuss Visual Studio for Mac in detail. I will only discuss the necessary elements of this IDE. You can find a comprehensive description of Visual Studio for Mac in the book Beginning Visual Studio for Mac. Build Cross-Platform Apps with Xamarin and .NET Core by Alessandro Del Sole.
D. Borycki, Beginning Xamarin Development for the Mac, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3132-6_1
Figure 1-1. The Hello, World! app we will build in this chapter. The app is executed in the iPhone X simulator.
Setting Up the Development Environment
To install Visual Studio for Mac, you’ll need a Mac with macOS Sierra 10.12 or above. Here, I’ll be using either a MacBook Pro or iMac with macOS Sierra 10.16. Once you know that you meet basic platform requirements, you can download the Visual Studio installer from the following website: http://bit.ly/vs-mac. Once you have downloaded the installation package, run the installer. A window appears, as shown in Figure 1-2. In this window, you double-click the icon with a down arrow. Subsequently, you will see a dialog informing you that the installer was downloaded from the internet (Figure 1-3). Click the Open button to continue.
1-2. An installer for Visual Studio for Mac
1-3. A confirmation dialog
Visual Studio installer will now verify your system configuration (Figure 1-4). More specifically, it looks for installed components (like Mono Framework, Java SDK, and so on) in order to verify which of them have to be downloaded and installed. Once this is done, another dialog appears on top of the window shown in Figure 1-4. Its header tells you “Thank you for downloading Visual Studio.” In this dialog, you simply press the Continue button.
Figure
Figure
At this point, the Visual Studio installer might prompt you to install Xcode (Figure 1-5). This happens only if you do not have Xcode already installed. According to this dialog, you can install Xcode concurrently with the Visual Studio installation. Note that the Xcode installation is optional and depends on your current system configuration. I assume that you start with a clean install of macOS and therefore explicitly show how to install Xcode.
Figure 1-4. Visual Studio installer is inspecting the operating system
Figure 1-5. A dialog prompting for Xcode installation
To install Xcode, you can press the Get Xcode button shown in Figure 1-5. This will direct you to a website, where you click the View in Mac App Store or Install App button. It opens the Xcode page in the App Store, on which you only need to click the Install App button (Figure 1-6). Alternatively, to install Xcode you can open the Mac App Store locally and then look up Xcode. Irrespective of which method you choose, Xcode and all related developer tools will be downloaded and installed in the background. So, you can now go back to Visual Studio installer.
Figure 1-6. Xcode page in the Mac App Store
The Visual Studio installer will now let you choose which components to install (Figure 1-7). To reduce installation size, I uncheck the “Android + Xamarin.Forms” entry and only install iOS- and macOS-related components. Then, after you click the Install button, the actual installation process begins.
Figure 1-7. Choosing components to install
Visual Studio will now download and install the components. This will take a while, depending on network speed. You will be informed about each installation step and the overall progress, as shown in Figure 1-8. Also, as depicted in this figure, macOS may prompt you for the administrator password several times during installation. Once installation has finished, an appropriate dialog appears. Note that to build and run apps in the simulator, you will need to wait until Xcode installation has finished.
Hello, World! App
After installing the development tools, we can start building the first app. To jumpstart the Xamarin.iOS development, I will tell you how to create the project using the Single View app template. Then, we will supplement the app with a single button. This button will react to taps such that the native alert will be displayed. Subsequently, we will add specific actions to this alert. Displaying alerts is a typical functionality of not only introductory apps, but also real apps, where it is used to collect user input or get confirmation for performing irreversible operations.
Creating the Project
To create the project, open Visual Studio for Mac. A welcome screen, depicted in Figure 1-9, appears. Then, you either choose File/New Solution in the menu bar or click the New Project button, located under the “Recent” header. This activates the New Project window, shown in Figure 1-10.
Figure 1-8. Installing Visual Studio for Mac
Figure 1-9. A welcome screen for Visual Studio for Mac
The New Project creator lets you choose a template for your project. To filter the list of templates to items directly related to iOS apps, you click App entry under the iOS tab. A list of available project templates will then appear on the right. This list is divided into two categories: General and Games. In this book, we will only use project templates from the General group. This category contains the following templates:
• Single View App — You use this template to create the app, which comprises a single view; i.e., an app without any navigation, like the app shown in Figure 1-1
• Master-Detail App — This template creates apps that use Master-Detail interface. In such cases, a list displays short descriptions of objects. Once you choose an object from this list (master), corresponding details will be displayed in the dedicated area (detail). Master-Detail interface is used, for example, in the Stocks iOS app (Figure 1-11).
Figure 1-10. Project template selection
Figure 1-11. Representational view of a Master-Detail iOS app. The list of objects (companies) is shown on top. When you tap any of these objects, corresponding details (stock values) appear at the bottom.
• Tabbed App — You use this template to create a multi-tab application in which you can arrange visual controls in multiple tabs. User then navigates between tabs using labeled icons shown at the botton of the screen. Such navigation is used in the Clock iOS app (Figure 1-12).
• Page-based App — Use this template to create a multi-view app in which controls are arranged in pages. The user swipes between pages with touch gestures. For instance, such page-based navigation is utilized in the Weather iOS app, shown in Figure 1-13
Figure 1-12. An example of Tabbed iOS application. You switch between tabs using labeled icons displayed in the bottom part of the view
• WebView App — You use this template to jumpstart hybrid app development. This project template creates a view with an embedded WebView control. The latter renders a website written with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I will tell you more about WebView in Chapter 3
To proceed further, let’s pick the Single View app project template and keep the default language selection of C#. Then, you will have the option to specify the name of your app and organization identifier (Figure 1-14). I set these values to HelloWorld and com.db, respectively. The next group of controls in app configuration lets you specify which devices will be supported by your app. In this case, I made my app universal and chose iPad and iPhone. The very last control in the app configuration screen is the Target drop-down list. You use this list to select the minimum iOS version that will be supported by your app. I set this to iOS 9.0. After configuring the app, press the Next button, which activates the view depicted in Figure 1-15.
Figure 1-13. Page-based navigation is utilized in the Weather app to switch between weather forecasts
1-14. iOS app configuration
The Project Summary window shown in Figure 1-15 displays the project and solution names. You can also use this screen to set the location for your source code, enable version control, and add an automated UI test project. Here, I keep the settings at their default values. I will tell you more about unit testing in Chapter 6. So, go ahead and press the Create button to proceed further. You will quickly see the Getting Started screen of Visual Studio (Figure 1-16).
Figure
Figure 1-15. Project summary
The Getting Started screen displays several options for you. Specifically, it lets you start designing the user interface (UI) of your app, add a mobile backend, and unit test the project. Also, on the left-hand side of this window you will see the Solution Explorer, which displays the structure of the HelloWorld app. Specifically, there is a HelloWorld solution, under which you can find the project of the same name (refer to Figure 1-15). This project contains the files that make up your app. They are discussed in more detail in the next chapter. For now, let’s create a simple UI for the HelloWorld app using the Storyboard (or iOS) Designer.
Storyboard Designer
To start creating the UI, you can click the Open Storyboard Designer button. This will open the Main. storyboard file and activate the Visual Interface or Storyboard Designer (or simply iOS Designer) of Visual Studio. This designer is shown in Figure 1-17. Three elements of this designer should be discussed in more detail, as follows:
• Visual preview of the app. This element covers the central part of the designer and lets you see how your views will be displayed in the device without your having to run your app. For multi-view apps, the visual preview will also depict the relationships between views (tabs or pages) through which the user can navigate.
• Toolbox, which is in the top-right corner, contains a list of visual objects you can drag on the view.
• Properties window, located below the Toolbox. You use the Properties window to change the appearance of and configure visual controls, to define the layout, and to wire methods to events (like tap or input) fired by controls.
Note that you can also activate the preceding windows or pads using an appropriate menu option in Visual Studio: View ➤ Pads (see Figure 1-18). There is also one useful drop-down list in the preview mode. That is the View As list, which you can find on the top pane of the visual preview. The View As drop-down list lets you choose the device type to use for the preview. As shown in Figure 1-17, I set this device to iPhone 6.
Figure 1-16. HelloWorld project open in Visual Studio
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S. Muzzey
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WELLS, CAROLYN (MRS HADWIN HOUGHTON)
, comp. Book of humorous verse.
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“In praising so large a work, one must presumably begin with its arrangement. Arrangement is a negative quality, but a great one: it is the faculty of not muddling the reader, and Wells possesses it in a high degree. Selection is of course a more controversial topic, and here the critics can get going if they think it worth while. A third merit is the style. The surface of Wells’ English is poor, and he does not improve its effect when he tints it purple. But it does do its job. Arrangement, selection, style; so these make up the case for his ‘Outline,’ and it is an overwhelming case. ” E. M. F.
p8 Jl 2 ’20 1100w
“Now for the defects, and the first of them is a serious one. Wells’ lucidity, so satisfying when applied to peoples and periods, is somehow inadequate when individuals are thrown on to the screen. The outlines are as clear as ever, but they are not the outlines of living men. He seldom has created a character who lives and a similar failure attends his historical evocations.... Such are the defects of the book; but, as the previous article indicated, they are entirely outweighed by its great merits.” E.
M. F.
Ath p42 Jl 9 ’20 1950w
“It has been a great book, finely planned, well arranged, full of vivid historical sketches and of telling raps upon the knuckles and noses of the great, but as soon as it starts for the stars its charm decreases.” E.
M. F.
Ath p690 N 19 ’20 1500w
Booklist 17:110 D ’20
“The great thing which Wells has done—and it is, unqualifiedly, a very great thing is to state the evolutionary concept of history as a continuing, growing entity, in terms readily understandable of the common man. It is not too much to call it the most potentially formative book of our day.” H. L. Pangborn
Bookm 52:358 Ja ’21 950w
“In his entire career Mr Wells has never written a more important book than this. It is a superlatively fascinating piece of writing, in all its details and as a whole, and it proves that the best historian is the man with imagination who has created, or who is capable of creating, real literature.” E. F. Edgett
Boston Transcript p6 N 24 ’20 2850w
“This is the true and lasting value of the work of Wells that he has given our world a greatest common historical denominator.” H. W. van Loon
Dial 70:202 F ’21 720w
“History as seen through the temperament of Mr Wells is novel, piquant, and entertaining. Mr Wells has no sense of time, for he discusses events in the remote past as if they were still happening. This gives vividness to his story and truthfulness, too.... With the chapter on Buddhism the ‘Outline’ reaches its high water mark. From thence on, a startling change is noticeable. And the change is for the worse. J. S. Schapiro
Nation
112:sup224
F 9 ’21 9250w
“There is one criticism that I should like to make. Mr Wells has written political history and overlooked economic facts.... One cannot help wishing that Mr Wells had restrained his enthusiasm a little by omitting Book 1, and thus clipping off several hundred million years from the period which he was seeking to cover. He might also have eliminated Book 2 on ‘The making of man. ’ I am glad that there was someone in the English-speaking world brave enough
and earnest enough and with enough leisure time to write it.” Scott Nearing
N Y Call p8 N 29 ’20 1500w
“It is eminently readable. Mr Wells could not write dull if he tried to. The first impression made by his volumes is deepened by their study. It is that Mr Wells has undertaken a task too great for his powers and equipment. Mr Wells has, of course, read widely and industriously. Yet his sources are plainly meagre. They are almost exclusively English.”
N Y Times p1 N 14 ’20 2550w
“Certain sections the early chapters upon the origin of the earth and of man upon the earth, the part dealing with the rise and spread of Buddhism, for examples are excellent when read by themselves.”
E. L. Pearson
Review 3:558 D 8 ’20 60w
“Most of us think of history only in terms of the records of particular nations, races or periods. Mr Wells ventures on a far bolder conception—viewing all human history as one whole. If the work did nothing more than to fix definitely this new viewpoint it would be worth while.”
R of Rs 63:111 Ja ’21 220w
“High-school history teachers and students will read the work with profit. They certainly come more nearly being world-history than any
previous work in the field.”
School R 29:155 F ’21 900w
Spec 122:698 N 22 ’19 190w
“It is good to take a broad view of history, and Mr Wells has done a real service to his generation by writing this entertaining ‘Outline.’ He has found a talented illustrator in Mr Horrabin, whose numerous maps and diagrams and reconstructions of extinct mammals are very attractive and helpful. There are also many photographs, well chosen and well reproduced.”
Spec 124:798 Je 12 ’20 300w
“There is room for Mr Wells’s ‘Outline of history,’ for the hand of the specialist has lain heavy on this branch of scholarship, and the books which give a bird’s-eye view of world history are few and not very accessible.”
Springf’d Republican p15 D 21 ’19 380w
Springf’d Republican p13a F 8 ’20 1000w (Reprinted from London Nation)
“The ‘History’ is a remarkable one: there should be more books as readable and provocative and daring.” P. B. McDonald
Springf’d Republican p7a N 21 ’20 1100w
The Times [London] Lit Sup p693 N 27 ’19 880w
“Magnificent as is the panorama which Mr Wells unfolds, the details of it are sometimes questionable.”
The Times [London] Lit Sup p415 Jl 1 ’20 1050w
The Times [London] Lit Sup p612 S 23 ’20 2000w
“Mr Wells’s work should find its way into all but the most bigoted sectarian colleges and even into the schools, as supplementary reading for both teacher and pupil.” J. H. Robinson Yale R n s 10:412 Ja ’21 2650w
A story of the British coal industry by the author of “Songs of a miner.” While yet a mere boy Robert Sinclair sits up long past his bed time to listen to the talk between his father and Robert Smillie, and it is the inspiration of that remembered conversation that sends him far in the growing labor movement. Robert goes into the pit at twelve years and on that very day there is an accident in the mine that kills
his father and brother and leaves him his mother’s chief support. The story pictures the hard conditions in a disorganized industry, the tyranny of the foreman and his control of the private lives of the men, and the discouraging efforts to form a union. Robert loses the girl he loves and in the end meets his father’s fate in the mine while trying to save others. His mother is left desolate and the author’s final plea is to the men to stand firm together and protect their women folk from such tragedies.
“James Welsh, the miner, has rough-hewn a rather powerful and readable tract.”
N Y Evening Post p22 O 23 ’20 230w
Sat R 129:477 My 22 ’20 180w
“As he commands a fluent and forcible pen, complete mastery of the dialect, and an unflinching realism in the treatment of details, his work claims attention as well as respect.”
Spec 124:765 Je 5 ’20 670w
The Times [London] Lit Sup p202 Mr 25 ’20 170w
WENDELL, BARRETT. Traditions of European literature, from Homer to Dante. *$6 Scribner 809
20–20996
This book has developed from lectures given at Harvard between 1904 and 1917. The author says: “Years of dealing with Harvard students had shown me not only that Americans now know little of the literary traditions of our ancestral Europe, but also that they are seldom aware even of the little they know.” (Introd.) He adopts the point of view of “English-speaking Americans of the twentieth century of the Christian era ” and concerns himself with those traditions of literature “which, we need not ask why, have chanced among ourselves to survive the times of their origin.” His task is somewhat simplified by the fact that during the period covered, from Homer to Dante, the traditions “originating in the primal European civilisation of Greece, and extending throughout imperial dominion of Rome, remained for many centuries a common possession of all Europe.” It has been possible therefore to treat the subject as a whole. This is done in five books: The traditions of Greece; The traditions of Rome; The traditions of Christianity; The traditions of Christendom; The traditions of the middle ages. Bibliographical suggestions occupy twenty-three pages and there is an index.
Booklist 17:147 Ja ’21
“Nothing brings a keener joy to the heart of a conscientious reviewer than to have in his hands to appraise and to praise a book which seems to him altogether good worthy in theme, comprehensive in conception, shapely in plan and skillful in execution. This joy is mine now that I have read this admirable example of interpretive scholarship.” Brander Matthews
N Y Times p3 D 26 ’20 1750w
WEST, WILLIS MASON.
Story of modern progress; with a preliminary survey of earlier progress. (Allyn and Bacon’s ser. of school histories) il $2 Allyn 940.2
20–7751
This work is a successor to the author’s “The modern world” written with a redistribution of time to give more space and emphasis to the period since 1870. The author says, “I have taken glad advantage of the chance to write a new book, better suited, I hope, to elementary high-school students; and I have used the treatment in the ‘Modern world’ only when I have found it simpler and clearer than any change I could make today.” (Foreword) An unusual amount of space has been given to English history, while American history, which is sure of full treatment elsewhere, is omitted “except where the connection of events demands its introduction.” Contents: Introduction: a survey of earlier progress; Age of the reformation, 1520–1648; England in the seventeenth century; The age of Louis XIV and Frederick II, 1648–1789; The French revolution; Reaction, 1815–1848; England and the industrial revolution; Continental Europe, 1848–1871; England, 1815–1914; Western Europe, 1871–1914; Slav Europe to 1914; The war and the new age. There is a list of books for high schools, followed by an index and pronouncing vocabulary.
“This present ‘Story of modern progress ’ is consoling in a measure, but also provoking. The writer has some straight views, then again, the three-hundred-year-old tradition enfolds him.”
Cath World 111:824 S ’20 550w
“For a one-year course in modern European history there is possibly no better text on the market.”
School R 28:549 S ’20 280w
WESTERVELT, GEORGE CONRAD, and others. Triumph of the N.C.’s. il *$3 Doubleday 629.
20–7597
The N.C.’s are flying boats as distinguished from hydroaeroplanes and the present volume contains the story of their design and building and of their first achievements. In part 1 Commander G. C. Westervelt tells “How the flying boats were designed and built” the immense number of details that had to be worked out, the numerous tests that had to be conducted, and the many troublesome features that had to be corrected. Part 2—The “lame duck” wins—is Lieut.Commander A. C. Read’s story of the transatlantic flight of the N. C. 4. Part 3 contains the log of the N. C. 3 by Commander H. C. Richardson, who also gives an account of previous attempts at transatlantic flight.
Booklist 16:335 Jl ’20
“The story of the crossing is told in lively and readable narrative, with picturesque details and with unassuming modesty.”
N Y Times 25:22 Jl 18 ’20 500w
WESTON,
GEORGE.
Mary minds her business. il *$1.75 (2½c) Dodd
20–4960
Of the long line of Josiahs of the firm of Josiah Spencer & son, successful manufacturers, Mary’s father was the last. His cousin, Stanley Woodward, had long been figuring on the eventuality of Josiah’s demise, to get entire control of the business. But he had not counted on Mary. His first shock came when Mary had herself chosen president of the corporation and proceeded, with the coaching of a friendly judge and business councilor to run things for herself. And run them she did in a most revolutionary manner. She employed women to such an extent that the factory was finally worked entirely by women on a greater level of efficiency than ever. Other reforms went hand in hand a rest room, nurseries, kindergarten, laundry, an orchestra of one hundred pieces all played by women. Of course there was fighting to do, Uncle Stanley to be over-ruled, his son Burdon to be shown his place. When the scheme was out of the woods and the most pressing suitor married off, the woman in Mary was alone and aweary and it was then that Archey Forbes, the construction engineer, came into his own.
Booklist 16:315 Je ’20
“The light story has sometimes, under Mr Weston’s pen, developed a diaphanous quality, which has made us wonder why it was worth writing at all. Now in surprising manner Mr Weston has discovered some ideas—not very new ones perhaps, but nevertheless things of substance.”
