Drop down selection box take up all real estate

[chrissieh]

This is a UI design request. Users like to know where they are in a system at all times. When in an inspection, a user interacts with a drop down input selection, the resulting list takes up the entire space, when in reality, it could be a lot smaller so that you could still see the form in the background so that if you didnt want to select a different item, the user could just click back into the form which would close the selection window. See screenshots for examples:

Current form:

Selecting the option dropdown list (whole window, obliterates originating form:

How it could potentially look for context and easier navigation:

Whilst we are at it, any chance to make the whole UI adjustable. Even putting the panasonic toughbook text scaling to 100% to try to reduce the text and input boxes down, means we have hard to use scroll bars and loss of tabs if too many items within the one tab.

Oh and similar to another issue I read, is there any documentation that is more recent than version 2.5?
;)