17

Many KDE applications use movable panels to display information. Dolphin for example uses this to show "places" and "information". I like the reconfigurability offered by them, but to me there has always been one annoyance: when multiple panels are stacked on top of each other, resizing the application causes both panels to increase (decrease) in size so that the relative size of both panels (ratio) remains the same.

While this behavior is sometimes wanted, it often causes scrollbars to show up when they aren't needed, like shown in these pictures:

This window:

http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/530/largeh.png

Looks like this when it's resized:

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4712/smallg.png

I believe this problem can be resolved without too much effort: when the user sees the window in the second screen shot, he will resize the upper window. Instead of just storing this as the new ratio, it should remember both old and new ratios and window sizes.

When the user next resizes the window, instead of just keeping the ratios fixed, they can now gradually change from one to the other. This way, the user can easily and unobtrusively choose how the panels should resize when the window size changes.