So you have OS X Lion installed and you’re starting to use Launchpad. But you don’t want all those programs to be shown in there. Unfortunately, OSX shares the same properties as iOS, if you delete it from the Launcher, you uninstall it from your computer, considering it is an app from the Mac App Store. Obviously, it is easy to redownload the app, but that’s not what we are after.
For all of us current iOS users, deleting an app makes sense from the Launchpad. However, you cannot delete apps that you installed outside of the Mac App Store. So if you don’t want those showing, you need to put them in a folder, or remove them from your applications folder. There is however a way to totally clear out the Launchpad and start fresh. A web developer found a way of deleting all app records from the Launchpad database. This would then let you drag any app you wanted to be shown in the Launchpad, to the Launchpad icon in our dock. Here are the steps to getting this done:
Backup your database! Open Terminal and type:
mkdir ~/Desktop/DB_Backup
cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db ~/Desktop/DB_Backup/
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db ‘DELETE FROM apps;’ &&killall Dock
That’s it! Now go open up your Launchpad, and it will be blank. Now just drag the apps you want shown into the dock icon for Launchpad and you are all set.
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