One of the useful things that you can do with a GUI (as compared to a textual interface) is resize windows according to your needs. This was a feature that was really useful when we had low resolution screens and when we were required to resize portions of an application which we used the most.
However, now that we all have huge screen real estates, does resizing make sense anymore? I think that in most cases it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to make applications and parts thereof resizable. Now-a-days I hardly find myself resizing anything on my 1680×1050 screen (I hardly also find the need to move and position windows).
That said there are certain apps that you need to resize (hopefully only once because they remember the setting). These are applications that are not properly designed for the purpose at hand. This is a good indicator of the fact that the developers don’t use their own app often enough, else they would have sized it properly in the first place.
While resizability is a good feature to have, it is not that essential anymore. More so, if you are using a GUI toolkit that makes supporting resizability a pain.
