Stardew Valley, the Herculean effort from sole designer Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, is massively popular across every platform it’s been ported to – and that’s practically everything, including PS Vita and Nintendo Switch. Now you can cross iOS (with Android coming soon) off the list at long last, with the long-awaited mobile version of the indie farming sim/role-playing game finally out on the market. It’s available now for just about anyone who wants to carve out some time to try the accessible yet challenging sim game, and its mobile iteration is its most ambitious yet. It succeeds at making farming and everything that goes with it a fun and intriguing adventure for just about everyone, too, albeit with a few small missteps that come with the mobile territory.

The game invites you to take on the mammoth responsibility of caring for your late grandfather’s farm, which is a sizable plot of land that lays in disrepair. It’s your job to build up your plot of land to its former glory while getting on with the other citizens of Pelican Town, where the game all goes down. This includes growing crops, raising livestock, and performing a variety of important activities that all take place in day-to-day farming. Much like the very similar Harvest Moon series, you’ve got to take care of everything on your own, whether that means clearing your farming area of bushes and rocks to make space for crops, watering them, harvesting them, and collecting supplies to keep things running smoothly.

Planting crops and harvesting them means you’ll turn a profit, of course, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Crafting, raising livestock, and interacting with the NPCs around you play large roles in the game as well. There’s always something new to do, whether you’re getting to know the abundance of NPCs out in the world, learning to fish and selling off your hard-fought spoils, or heading into the mines to become a seasoned member of the Adventurer’s Guild. There really feels as though there’s no end to what you can accomplish, no matter if you’re just starting out or heading back in for round two, three, or four – no shame!

But despite all of these things being available for you at any given time, there’s no real push to try and make you concentrate on one thing out of it all. You can explore as you wish, at your own leisurely pace, whether you spend an entire day weeding your fledgling farmland or meet up with the locals before going to your in-game bed to advance time to the next day. If there’s a special someone you enjoy speaking to and getting to know, there’s even a chance you might marry them one day, which is a delight in and of itself.

There’s always something more to do around the corner, and the game reminds you of this at every turn. But it never forces you into completing objectives if you don’t want to. It continually introduces new optional quests to take on as it gently pushes you to dig deeper into the systems it’s already lavished you with. It’s difficult to believe all this content is the work of one man, as it’s polished and in fine form, and all here laid out for you to enjoy once more, even if you’ve clocked an ungodly number of hours on another platform.

Mechanically, Stardew Valley‘s iOS version is just as sound as ever. It’s the same fantastic, content-rich game you’ve likely played on just about every other platform. Unfortunately, the mobile version makes a few sacrifices to make it accessible for players on the go. You can tap on the screen to make your character travel to a certain point and tap and drag. It works well enough, but it can be frustrating when navigating tight quarters such as your farmland, which is lined with rocks and other obstacles at the beginning of the game.

What’s more, your tool line-up is set on the left side of the screen in the vertical position, which makes tapping or dragging your character to travel in that direction a pain when you’re forever accidentally hitting a tool instead of heading to the next screen. This is an issue those who play on other platforms won’t run into and isn’t a huge problem, but it’s massively frustrating sometime when you keep having to switch from tool to tool instead of moving to the next screen. Combat controls don’t get any better, but it’s serviceable. Again, these are minor problems in the grand scheme of things (such as the whole of Stardew Valley being available here on mobile), but it’s also enough to drive one to hope for MFi controller support in the future.

Additionally, there’s no multiplayer option available, though it’s not exactly the version I’d recommend playing with others on – it’s still something players would like to see eventually, though, myself included.

Stardew Valley on iOS is another excellent version of the popular farming title, and while it has its own platform-related peculiarities, it’s still very much the same fantastic product, with everything you love about the other versions packed in here. It’s a great and affordable way to experience the full game if you haven’t already, and while you might get a touch annoyed with its mobile-centric control scheme, it’ll still suck you in immediately for the long haul – better settle in.

Many different customers across industries want to have insights into the emotional moments that appear in different parts of their media content. For broadcasters, this can help create more impactful promotion clips and drive viewers to their content; in the sales industry it can be super useful for analyzing sales calls and improve convergence; in advertising it can help identify the best moment to pop up an ad, and the list goes on and on. To that end, we are excited to share Video Indexer’s (VI) new machine learning model that mimics humans’ behavior to detect four cross-cultural emotional states in videos: anger, fear, joy, and sadness.

Endowing machines with cognitive abilities to recognize and interpret human emotions is a challenging task due to their complexity. As humans, we use multiple mediums to analyze emotions. These include facial expressions, voice tonality, and speech content. Eventually, the determination of a specific emotion is a result of a combination of these three modalities to varying degrees.

While traditional sentiment analysis models detect the polarity of content – for example, positive or negative – our new model aims to provide a finer granularity analysis. For example, given a moment with negative sentiment, the new model determines whether the underlying emotion is fear, sadness, or anger. The following figure illustrates VI’s emotion analysis of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s speech on the importance of education. At the very beginning of his speech, a sad moment was detected.

All the detected emotions and their specific appearances along the video are enumerated in the video index JSON as follows:

Cross-channel emotion detection in VI

The new functionality utilizes deep learning to detect emotional moments in media assets based on speech content and voice tonality. VI detects emotions by capturing semantic properties of the speech content. However, semantic properties of single words are not enough, so the underlying syntax is also analyzed because the same words in a different order can induce different emotions.

VI leverages the context of the speech content to infer the dominant emotion. For example, the sentence “… the car was coming at me and accelerating at a very fast speed …” has no negative words, but VI can still detect fear as the underlying emotion.

VI analyzes the vocal tonality of speakers as well. It automatically detects segments with voice activity and fuses the affective information contained within with the speech content component.

With the new emotion detection capability in VI that relies on speech content and voice tonality, you are able to become more insightful about the content of your videos by leveraging them for marketing, customer care, and sales purposes.

For more information, visit VI’s portal or the VI developer portal, and try this new capability for free. You can also browse videos indexed as to emotional content: sample 1, sample 2, and sample 3.  

Have questions or feedback? We would love to hear from you!

Use our UserVoice to help us prioritize features, or email VISupport@Microsoft.com with any questions.

Open source software isn’t just proliferating within technology infrastructures around the world, it is also creating profound opportunities for people with relevant skills. Organizations of all sizes have reported widening skills gaps in this area. Linux tops the list as the most in-demand open source skill, according to the 2018 Open Source Jobs Report. With this in mind, In this article series, we are taking a closer look at one of the best new ways to gain open source and Linux fluency: the Introduction to Open Source Software Development, Git and Linux training course from The Linux Foundation.

This story is the third in a four-part article series that highlights major aspects of the training course. The first article in the series covered the course’s general introduction to working with open source software, with a focus on such essentials as project collaboration, licensing, legal issues and getting help. The second article covered the course curriculum dedicated to working with Bash and Linux basics.

Working with commands and command-line tools are essential Linux skills, and the course delves into task- and labs-based instruction on these topics. The discussion of major command-line tools is comprehensive and includes lessons on:

• Locating files with find and locate

• Finding character strings in files using grep

• Substituting strings in files using sed

There is a Labs module that asks you to set the prompt to a current directory and encourages follow up by changing the prompt to any other desired configuration. In addition to being self-paced, the course focuses on performing meaningful tasks rather than simply reading or watching.

Overall, the course contains 43 hands-on lab exercises that will allow you to practice your skills, along with a similar number of quizzes to check your knowledge. It also provides more than 20 videos showing you how to accomplish important tasks.

As you go through these lessons, keep in mind that the online course includes many summary slides, useful lists, graphics, and other resources that can be referenced later. It’s definitely worth setting up a desktop folder and regularly saving screenshots of especially useful topics to a folder for handy reference. For example, here is a slide that summarizes the handy utilities that any user should have in his or her toolbox:

With the groundwork laid for working with the command line and command line tools, the course then comprehensively covers working with Git, including hands-on learning modules. We will explore the course’s approach to this important topic in the next installment in this series.

Learn more about Introduction to Open Source Development, Git, and Linux (LFD201) and sign up now to start your open source journey.