This week on The Shift with Drex, I talked about the massive launch of Disney+, the Braava Jet robotic mop that will keep your floors clean, and what it’s like playing Death Stranding.

This week, iRobot’s Braava robot mop is a perfect companion to the Roomba, Sandbox VR puts you and friends in another world, and Death Stranding turns you into a courier. But first, Disney+ is on air.

Disney+ takes to the air

There’s Netflix, and Crave, and Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV+.

Now there’s Disney+.

The new video streaming service is now live. For $9 a month ($90 a year), subscribers get access to much of the content owned by the Walt Disney Company, which includes those charming, albeit dated, family films from the ’60s and ’70s, classic animated films, Pixar films, everything Marvel, National Geographic, and more.

Oh, yeah. Also Star Wars.

The company also has a block of original programming that will be available only through Disney+, the most prominent of which is western-inspired The Mandalorian, which premiered on Tuesday.

Other originals include Kristin Bell’s Encore, which, years after the original performances, reunites high school classmates to re-stage the musicals of their youth.

There’s also High School Musical: The Musical!, a serial version of the popular movie franchise, and The World According to Jeff Goldblum from National Geographic, in which the animated actor explores the nature of everyday objects (the first episode is all about sneakers).

New episodes of these original series are being released on Fridays.

You can subscribe online or through the Disney+ app available on the App Store or Google Play. You can also download the Disney+ client on whatever box you’ve got connected to your TV, including Roku sticks and PS4 and Xbox One game consoles.

iRobot doing even more to keep your floors clean with Braava robot mop

Here in Vancouver we’ve had an unseasonably dry fall, but the rains will come. And when they do, you might want to think about getting yourself a Braava jet m6 from iRobot to keep your floors clean.

This is the same company that makes the Roomba robot vacuums, and all of the innovation that has gone into the vacuums has also gone into the mops.

That includes the “Imprint Smart Mapping” that the robots use to learn your floor plan and design the ideal cleaning pattern. With your smartphone, you can also interact with that map to define “keep out” zones, so the Braava, which is for hard surfaces after all, doesn’t go onto your shag carpet.

The Braava is smarter than that, actually, so it won’t try and get onto carpet. It’s also smart enough so that if it runs out of power in the middle of a cleaning cycle, it will go back to the home base and recharge only as long as it needs to to complete the clean. It knows it will get a full charge when the job is done.

And if you’ve got either the i7 or s9 model of Roomba, the two robots will talk to each other, so when the vacuum is done, it tells the mop to get to work.

The Braava jet m6 auto detects the cleaning pad you’ve attached to it. There are single use wet mops or sweeping pads, and washable versions which can be used up to 50 times before needing to be replaced.

And if you’ve got a particularly nasty mess, you can use a solution in the Braava to clean it up.

The Braava jet m6 retails for $700.

Remember: the rains are coming.

Experience multiplayer gaming virtual reality at Sandbox VR

Virtual reality (VR) entertainment is quite something to experience. It’s even more when you can experience it with other people.

That’s what Sandbox VR gives you. You might be wearing a headset, so not interacting with other people in the traditional way, but at Sandbox you’re in the sandbox with up to five other players.

The sandbox is a mostly empty room that becomes any number of things when you put on the headset. There are three different games you can play: Deadwood Mansion (zombies), Curse of Davy Jones (skeletons), and Amber Sky 2088 (aliens).

Each of the experiences is a variation of an on-rails first person shooter. Except you have the weapon in your hands and you’re walking around freely.

This is because you’re carrying the computer that runs your VR kit in a lightweight MSI backpack. Sandbox VR is using Oculus headsets supplemented with additional technology that tracks your body movement in the real world to move your avatar in the game space.

When you’re done, you get a video that intercuts the game experience with footage of your group in the room, delivered as a movie trailer.

New experiences coming include UFL, which pits two players against each other in futuristic melee combat, and Star Trek: Discovery, Away Mission.

Sandbox has locations around the world, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The only Canadian location is the B.C. Lower Mainland.

But if you’re in the greater Vancouver area and need something fun to do for a staff holiday party or fun with friends, you should definitely give Sandbox VR a try.

A 20- to 30-minute game experience costs $48 per player.

Death Stranding’s unique experience is compelling despite the clunky metaphors

Game designer Hideo Kojima has again conjured a strange, paranoid world that mirrors the dark corners of our own.

Kojima’s new world is a post-apocalyptic Earth that is the setting for Death Stranding, a Playstation 4 exclusive (a Windows release is scheduled for 2020) that is now available.

This is an open world game that, like many of Kojima’s games, features a troubled loner who gets caught up in momentous events that impact everything and everyone. Kojima is not just the game’s designer. He’s also the writer and director, and has always had firm control over the games he makes.

This auteur approach comes with problems, though. Death Stranding is one big mixed metaphor, with Kojima linking beached whales and social media obsession with notions of the afterlife and the apocalypse. He’d benefit from working with a strong editor who could help him pull his ideas together better.

His far-reaching philosophy has its merits, though. Fans of Kojima’s games revel in trying to find meaning in his sprawling vision. I’m pretty sure I caught a Cthulhu reference in one early sequence, for example. Whether it was an intentional reference by Kojima or I’m seeing something that only I can see is just fine.

Gamers delight in trying to understand the meaning and Kojima’s intent is, frankly, irrelevant.

And there is something weirdly compelling about Death Stranding. This is a game in which you are, essentially, a courier. The central mechanic is in figuring out how to carry hundreds of kilograms of weight on your back and still navigate a scrambling landscape. Strapping a package to your shoulder may balance you better, for example, than putting everything on your back.

As you progress through the game you get stronger, you can carry more weight, and your ability to move faster with more weight also improves.

Be prepared to be patient in the games first couple of hours, though, as you won’t actually play much. The set up of the world and the characters is mostly a movie that you periodically interact with – this is another Kojima characteristic – and the script is often laborious, with characters given to long lectures that explain the story to us.

While the exposition delivered in the dialogue is tiresome, the acting in Death Stranding is excellent. Norman Reedus stars as the protagonist, Sam Porter Bridges, and other prominent roles are played by Mads Mikelsen, Léa Seydoux, and Lindsay Wagner.

The mystery of what happened to Earth, and the former United States where the game is set, is slowly revealed through the course of the game. It revolves around time and dimensions and the connections between them. Rain is known “timefall” because it ages anything it touches, and the countryside is filled with otherworldly creatures that used to be humans before they died.

These “BTs” cannot be seen by normal people, so “bridge babies” are used to sense and see them. Bridge babies, “BBs”, are premature infants removed from their mothers and placed in artificial wombs.

There’s not a lot of combat in Death Stranding. While you are often confronted by antagonists, like the BTs, your best approach is usually to use stealth, and to run when necessary.

Death Stranding is a game that many people will not like for various reasons. But there will be people who will find exploring a strange and bizarre environment and becoming the best possible porter a sublime experience. And we’ve got Hideo Kojima – and Sony – to thank for it.

This week on The Shift with Drex, I talked about how Apple Arcade and Apple TV+ are in service of selling Apple computers and devices, about Adobe’s release of Photoshop on iPad and the upcoming Illustrator on iPad, about insecure GPS kid trackers, and about the move by Canadian mobile service providers to save us all from robocalls.

This week, cheap child GPS trackers are a problem. Also a problem? NRA employees editing Wikipedia entries. But first, Adobe’s finally got Photoshop on the iPad.

Full-featured Photoshop on the iPad, and Illustrator is coming

This week at the Adobe Max conference, the software company revealed Photoshop on iPad, a version of the popular image editing app that has been designed to provide most of the features professionals need on the iPad. And because Adobe has also changed the file format used by Photoshop, it means that work done on the iPad will sync with computers, allowing users to pick up where they left off on a different device.

While the iPad version of the software doesn’t provide everything that the computer version does, Adobe says that iPad Photoshop allows for the same kind of compositing, layering, and retouching that before has only been possible on computers.

What may be most important is the interface, which is very similar to what computer Photoshoppers are used to, with tools on the left and layers on the right. The controls have been designed for the touch interface, and Apple Pencil is supported.

If you already have a subscription to Photoshop, the new iPad version is included. A subscription to Adobe’s “photography” software is $10 USD a month, and gives you Photoshop on both computer and iPad, as well as Lightroom.

Adobe also announced that it has a team working on an iPad version of Illustrator, which is the software of choice for many artists and designers. The company said that it will also allow for creatives to work across devices with the same file and file format.

NRA employees suspected of editing Wikipedia to make the gun-rights org look better

In a shocking investigative story, journalists at Splinter News were able to establish that edits to some Wikipedia articles were being made from within the headquarters for the U.S. National Rifle Association (NRA).

By comparing the edits made by IP addresses that were associated with computers in the NRA facility in Fairfax, Virgina, Molly Osberg and Dhruv Mehrotra showed that some of “the additions quite regularly inserted NRA promotional materials into Wikipedia under the guise of fact.”

One anonymous editor from within the NRA building attempted to edit the Wikipedia page of former NRA president Marion Hammer, adding the following text:

“Tough. Professional. Skillful. Persistent. Honest. A person whose word you can count on. A legendary leader whose community service, devotion to America’s youth, and legendary leadership are all qualities that make Marion P. Hammer one of the most successful and respected Second Amendment freedom fighters of our time.”

Not very neutral, is it? The edits were live on Wikipedia for about five hours, before being rejected by other, more credible editors.

When it comes to child GPS trackers, opt for trustworthy over price

News from Avast, the technology privacy and security company that provides software solutions for personal users and businesses, that not all GPS trackers are created equally.

The company’s Threat Labs have discovered that 29 models of trackers being produced in China and sold on various online stores are not providing necessary security, so the devices are sending information to the cloud, “including the exact real-time GPS coordinates of children.”

There’s a longstanding notion that every business decision made by Apple has been in the service of selling more Mac computers. That may have been true when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod, but now that people can have iPhones and iPads without having an Apple computer, the company is shifting in the way that so many other tech companies have, into a content and services model.

Apple has always provided services to people who used its products. It was among the first to offer email addresses and has long supported cloud storage of things like calendars and address books. The release this fall of Arcade and Apple TV+ – which provide subscribers with access to a catalogue of video games, movies, and television shows – is a continued shift into the delivery of content.

And while it might not all be in service of selling computers, it’s certainly about selling Apple devices.

Apple Arcade

For a monthly subscription price of $5.99, up to five family members can access unlimited gaming with Apple Arcade. The games that are part of the service are free of both ads and microtransactions, and you can play them whether you’re connected or not. In the world of mobile gaming, this is transcendent.

But it’s a mistake to think of Apple Arcade as mobile gaming, because the experiences are designed to be played on multiple devices, and many of them support the use of a traditional game controller.

And many games, which run the gamut of types and genres, are being developed and published by Canadian indie studios.

Toronto’s Snowman has published the skateboard sim Skate City (developed by Agens) and the puzzle game Where Cards Fall (developed by the Game Band), which has players configuring playing card structures. And Saskatoon’s Noodlecake has published The Enchanted World (developed by AI Interactive), a puzzle game where you slide tiles of the board to create a path through the world.

Four different Vancouver-area developers have titles on Apple Arcade:

• Hot Lava, a port of Klei Entertainment’s game already available on Steam
• Stela, from Burnaby’s Skybox Labs, which is a side-scrolling platformer
• RAC7’s Sneaky Sasquatch, in which players become the elusive creature, avoiding humans and ultimately passing for one
• Pinball Wizard, Frosty Pop’s crazy hybrid of a pinball game and an RPG title

By far my favourite, though, is Capybara’s Grindstone. The clever developers at the Toronto studio have managed to come up with a puzzle game that is as inventive and compelling as Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, a game they built for Ubisoft back in 2009.

Apple TV+

It’s early days for Apple TV+. The service kicked off on November 1, and for a monthly fee of $5.99, subscribers get original programming like The Morning Show, produced by and starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and the Jason Momoa action vehicle See.

There’s also Dickinson, which stars Hailee Steinfeld as the poet and writer Emily Dickinson in a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and teenage soap opera, which has a similar sensibility that Baz Luhrmann brought to Shakespeare with his version of Romeo and Juliet.

And from Battlestar Galactica and Outlander showrunner Ronald Moore is For All Mankind, which imagines an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union was first to land on the moon and the space race never ended.

While reviews from critics and the public are all over the place on the first shows on the platform, Apple appears to be willing to play the long game with its video programming, building out exclusives that fit with its corporate tone.

The cross-device advantage

The low subscription prices for Apple Arcade and Apple TV+ are evidence that Apple is getting into the content and services business to sell hardware. There’s also the fact that everyone who purchases an Apple device will get a year of Apple TV+.

So unlike companies that are selling subscriptions as a primary business model – like Netflix – Apple is providing subsidized content as a way of making the Apple ecosystem a more compelling place to be.

And while you don’t need to have multiple Apple products to enjoy the content, the latest operating systems from Apple – macOS Catalina, iPad OS and iOS 13 – pull all of the content offerings together and enable them across devices in amazingly functional ways.

So you can stop playing or watching on one device, and pick up instantly on another. It is this seamless experience that Apple is hoping will not only keep people using its devices, but adding more of them.

With new iPhones and a new version of iPad just released, and rumours that a new model MacBook Pro is pending, there are lots of Apple devices that people can play games and watch videos on.

For Apple, it’s not just about computers, anymore. But it is about hardware.