Neven Mrgan wonders what an iOS desktop computer would look like, if Apple decides to bring iOS to the desk:

I hope Apple has serious plans to introduce something like a “desktop-sized” (15-24”?) iOS device. I have absolutely no idea what this device might look or function like. What angle do you use it at – flat on the table, completely vertical, or tilted, like a writing desk? Does it use an external keyboard? Again, I don’t know – there are brilliant people at Apple with the passion and the paycheck to think through these problems. And they will do so, assuming iOS is to become Apple’s new platform in a complete, decisive, and final way.

P.S. “It’s just a big iPad.”

There’s incredible potential for a desktop computer that can tilt back like a drafting table—we could draw directly on the screen, just like using an iPad, use touch input for quick, less intensive uses (like browsing the web), and fall back to a physical keyboard when we need it—but there’s a large gap to bridge between relatively simple touch interfaces and relatively sophisticated mouse-and-keyboard interfaces. Do we make an interface that works well for both? If so, how? If not, are separate interfaces for both too confusing? Is it possible that a touch interface is all we’ll need?

I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem for a little while, but I do think we’re going to have to solve it at some point. Developing two separate, parallel interfaces for perpetuity doesn’t make a lot of sense, and more importantly, having two separate kinds of devices isn’t going to make sense for people soon, either. The gap between a desktop computer’s functionality and the iPad’s is shrinking at a decent clip, and at some point not too distant from now, a large number of people are going to decide it’s the only computer they need. It’s not that they’ll be able to do anything they need to on an iPad, but rather that it does enough. And when that happens, we’re going to have to figure it out.

If you are planning on ordering Steve Jobs’s biography, which comes out on Monday, you can order it here. Using that link to order it will help support my writing, too.

I ordered the hardback for myself. I feel like this is a book I’m going to want to hold on to, revisit, and give to my kids to read. As much as I like ebooks, there’s still something special about getting, and keeping for years, a special book. I occasionally look through my copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, one of my favorite books, and I love seeing the notes I made along the way and what I was thinking.

Shawn Blanc explains how to add reminders to a shared list using Siri so you can, for example, share a reminders list with your spouse and remind them to pick up dark chocolate covered almonds while at Trader Joes (because, let’s be honest, you can never have enough).

It’s a bit convoluted to get set up, and you have to follow a specific syntax while telling Siri to add the reminder, but it works. This is some big time yeah, okay, I’m living in the future kind of stuff right here.

The Early Edition 2. Looks beautiful.

The big test for whether Siri will become a lasting interface is not whether geeks use it and like it, but whether regular people will. If Tory Briggs’s wife is any indication, it’s well on its way:

As soon as we had walked out of the store and entered the car I asked if I could show her how Siri worked. I immediately tried the first action I could remember from some of the reviews I had read – “Siri, please remind me to call my wife at 7 tonight” – after a moment the response and reminder eased into the screen and my wife’s jaw dropped. I merely said “it gets better.”

Andy Rubin doesn’t think phones should be an “assistant”:

“I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant,” the Android chief said in an interview on Wednesday just after appearing on stage at AsiaD. “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”

Odd, considering Android’s voice actions aren’t very different in the sense he’s talking about.

Matias Duarte:

“Across the board Google and Android is taking design a lot more seriously,” Matias says, and points out that Roboto is used throughout the system. “There’s this thing that’s happening right now in user interface design that I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, and the airport lavatory signage trend.” He laughs when he says this and pulls up a slide on his computer, a split screen of an Atari 2600 and… airport lavatory signage. It’s an obvious dig at both Apple and Microsoft.

“The biggest problem behind these trends is not anything about the aesthetic quality about them, but rather the framework that they impose on everything else,” he opines. “Right now if you look at all of these applications that are designed in this real-objecty, faux wood paneling, faux brushed metal, faux jelly button kind of thing… if you step back and you really look at them, they look kind of juvenile. They’re not photorealistic, they’re illustrations.”

And worse than that, a lot of them don’t even make any sense. Why should Apple’s Find My Friends app UI be set in leather? There’s no real-world object it’s mimicking so it’s easy to understand (and even if there were, that isn’t reason enough to design a touch application the same way). It’s a look, and an ugly one.

Shawn Blanc:

My first impression of Siri is that Siri is to the GUI what the GUI is to the command line. Meaning, using Siri is a far easier and quicker way to navigate certain tasks than using iPhone’s multi-touch user interface.

That’s a smart way of describing how big of a deal Siri is. Even in its first incarnation, it’s incredibly useful—being able to send and reply to texts and emails, and create calendar events, reminders and alarms all by voice makes these tasks much, much easier. I tend not to set reminders for myself because it’s too much of a pain to go through each task and set it up, but doing it by voice would make it almost effortless.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how far we’ve advanced in five years. In 2006, my best mobile device was a color iPod with a scroll wheel that had no WiFi, let alone apps; in 2011, it’s a touch-screen, 3G device that can browse the web, hold all of my media, communicate with anyone, and now I can accomplish tasks just through voice. That’s mind-blowing, and makes me wonder just how far from here we’ll be in another five years.

Jobs was intimately involved with designing Apple’s stores:

“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”

Just as Mr. Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that what Peter Bohlin and Apple are doing is one of the more exciting things in architecture today. Just look at the entrance to Apple’s new Shanghai store: it’s beautiful.

It says a lot about a company if they put so much thought and work into the stores that sell their product.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the iPhone 4S’s and Canon 5d MKII’s HD video.

Hard to believe that was shot with a phone. With an external microphone, there’s no reason you can’t make top-notch video with the iPhone 4S.

Marco Arment just released Instapaper 4, and it’s beautiful. What a great update to one of my favorite (and most used) applications.

Instacast now supports iCloud.

This means new subscriptions, played status of episodes, and even your current position in a podcast you are listening to are all synced across your devices using iCloud. That’s pretty awesome.

Rather than review iOS 5, I want to write a little about why I think Siri is important and what it means for the future of computing and the web. If you’d like to read a great iOS 5 review, Shawn Blanc will have you covered, I bet.

Every few months, I re-watch Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator video, a concept for what computing should be like. I watch it because it reminds me what technology is about: making people’s lives dramatically better, and creating a sense of magic or wonder in doing so.

In the video, there is a tablet device that uses touch input, recognizes natural language and acts on behalf of the user (e.g., “Call Diana at home”), and has networked data stores that allow people to find data with no effort searching for it (e.g., “Get data on the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest from 1992-1995″).

That video was incredibly forward-looking and insightful, but with iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, Apple is finally releasing the Knowledge Navigator. Its name is Siri. It isn’t as powerful, but we’re almost there. For me, this may be the most exciting thing Apple’s ever done, because it is moving toward realizing one of my favorite dreams.

Most articles about Siri have focused on Siri’s natural language recognition and how revolutionary it is. While it is integral, it is not the important part. It is the means, not the end. Focusing on Siri’s natural language recognition is like focusing on the original iPhone’s multitouch input; while it is what allows the iPhone’s magic, it is not the magic itself.

What is magical about Siri is that it allows people to talk to a device and it does what they tell it to. You can now ask your iPhone, “How many ounces are in three gallons?” and get an answer. You can tell our phone to schedule dinner at Chego in Los Angeles with your wife at 7pm on Friday and it will tell you that you already are going to see “50/50″ at that time. You can ask it if you’ll need an umbrella tomorrow, and it will tell you that, yes, you do.

What really excites me about this is not that I will be able to more easily create reminders, appointments and respond to text messages. (Although I am pretty excited about that.) What excites me is that this is the first version of what we saw in the Knowledge Navigator video: a device that I can ask for any kind of information, and because it (1) understands what I am asking for and (2) connects to different online services which provide data, it can give me that information. This is not just a vision for the future of computing devices, but the future of the web, too.

Interconnected and Semantic Magic

Currently, while the web contains an overwhelmingly-large amount of data, it is basically disparate and in silos. To find Microsoft’s financial performance in 1995, for example, I have to use a search engine to find a website that has that data and, if I can’t find one, I have to compute it myself using their financial statements (which I have to find as well). Siri is a dramatic step away from this.

All that data is there, but we have to work to find it. What we are moving toward, though, is not having to find it at all. Instead, because that data is made available through APIs,¹ I can simply ask it for data, and it won’t just return a source, but it will return the data itself in a useful format.

Let’s use Microsoft as an example again. Right now, if I wanted to see their operating profit as a percentage of sales from 1995-2005, I would need to find their financial statements, locate the data contained in them, and make the calculations myself. If I wanted to do anything useful, I would have to import it into a spreadsheet application (most likely by hand). Rather than doing this myself, though, I could just ask a future version of Siri for Microsoft’s operating margin between 1995 and 2005, and it would return that data to me in a table and chart.

Then I can ask it to compare Microsoft’s operating margin over that period compared to Hewlett-Packard’s, Dell’s and Apple’s.

That’s a big deal. That’s what happens when natural language recognition is integrated with web services. And that’s why Siri is important: it is a large step toward the future Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video envisioned, where not only do we have access to the greatest source of information in the history of the world, but we can we can access that data simply by asking for what we want to see, and we can manipulate the data just as easily.

We have all of the world’s data available, and there is no good reason we shouldn’t be able to access it effortlessly. Making that reality will make our lives easier, but more importantly, it will allow us to be even more imaginative and insightful, because the cost of getting data to analyze and compare and find patterns will be much lower than it is now.

I love business and technology because they are where philosophy, literature, art and science intersect to push us forward. Philosophers tell us what the good is, writers and artists tell us what the beautiful and inspiring is, scientists make it technically possible, and business make it economically feasible. Without science and business, philosophy, literature and art are only ideas in our minds; without philosophy, literature and art, scientists and businesses are directionless as to what they should do. But together, they change the world.

Siri is a wonderful example of this, and it’s why I love what Apple’s doing. They are not just creating the future. They are creating a better future for us all based on a beautiful vision they believe in. What’s more exciting than that?

1. Or, more preferably, some kind of service that centralizes data from across the web and makes it all available through an API that returns it based on natural language. E.g., if I ask it for the United States’s tax revenue-to-GDP ratio from 1930-2005, it will connect to the different data stores it works with, find the appropriate source, and return the data in a useful format. This kind of service will require common data formats to be used and a way to semantically understand the data itself, which people are really good at, but computers just aren’t quite yet. [↩]

One million iPhone 4Ss were pre-ordered within 24 hours. 600,000 iPhone 4s were pre-ordered on the first day last year.

It sure sounds like people are disappointed with the new iPhone.

Verbs, a really nice iOS instant messaging client, is now universal. What’s even better is it’s on sale today for $0.99.

That’s a no-brainer—go pick it up. Congratulations, guys!