[Maurice Ravel]

I don't know if there is a standard way for programs to open window positions on the Mac.

I do rather like the way OmniWeb allows you to save a "default" window size.

Apple's own Script Editor for AppleScript behaves like this, or in fact nearly like this, the Script Editor remembers the size of the window but opens each new window in any given session a bit down and across from the first window that was opened in that session. That first window is opened in the position you have saved in the Script Editor application. With Script Editor the previous open window size has no influence whatsoever on the size of a new window.

Historically programs like SimpleText just always opened a new window in exactly the same location without any consideration at all to previous window positions.

Seminal Mac programs like Nisus Writer open all new windows according the window size of a template file, which means of course all new files created with command-N always open in the same size which has been defined by the user who creates the template file.

In fact I think Microsoft Word behaves like this as it creates new files from a template as well, but I'm not sure about that one.

Personally I keep a group of extremely simple AppleScripts for setting windows on the Mac to favoured positions. This prevents a lot of dragging and resizing.

Here is an example of one:

tell application "OmniWeb"
activate
if window 1 exists then
set bounds of window 1 to {350, 0, 1500, 1100}
else
display dialog "No open window"
end if
end tell

I'm using a 20" screen iMac so the above co-ordinates work out well for me on that quite large screen.

If you work out a set of useful window sizes then you can just save the same script each time with the different window sizes entered of course.