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Rain Noe wrote an article on Apple’s new Touchscreen patent:

Touchscreens have one single but, as of yet, unadressed design flaw: your finger on the screen is obscuring the very elements you’re interacting with. This has several implications for the user interface, for example buttons need to be quite large so you can still see them.

Never fear though, the clever designers from Cupertino have come up with a solution for this particular dilemma. It’s still only a patent and I would be very surprised if this ever made it into a real product but it’s nevertheless a cool and unique idea.

Basically it’s an iPod or (i)Phone with a screen covering the whole front of the device. A transparent control layout on the screen allows interaction. The difference is, you’re not touching the screen, you touch the back, the opposite side of the controls. A cursor is shown to give you visual feedback on the position of your fingers and if you press harder, the device registers it as a click.

Since your fingers end up on the back of the iPod anyway, simply by virtue of holding the thing, it sounds like a pretty good idea. The whole thing, especially the cursor and “press harder to click” function might take a bit of getting used to but I’m sure Apple’s designers and engineers could come up with something.