When Launchpad first rocketed (sorry) onto the scene in Mac OS X Lion, most people were firmly in the “hate it” or “love it” camp. There didn’t seem to be much in between, but maybe that’s just due to the contentious nature of the internets. Regardless, today’s tip is firmly in the “love it” camp, showing you how to clean up Launchpad, add in just the Apps you want to use, and then a quick trick for clearing the background to show off that cool iOS-like Earth from space picture.
Launchpad automagically places every new app downloaded from the Mac App Store into it’s iOS-style grid structure. It also seems, on my system at least, to have every app I’ve ever had, stuffed into several “pages” of app icons. It’s all a bit much. If I’m wanting to make this thing useful, I’m gonna have to start from scratch.
First, open up Terminal, which is in the Utilities folder, itself found in the Applications folder. Once in Terminal, type or paste the following code:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps; \
DELETE from groups WHERE title<>''; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;" \
&& killall Dock
Bam. Launchpad will be empty of all the cruft that’s built up in your Applications folder and such over the years. If you want to put it back to the default, paste the following command into Terminal:
rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db \
&& killall Dock
Assuming you didn’t quickly put it all back to default settings, it’s time to make things look even more iOS like. First up, let’s clear up the background. If you followed the tips over the past few days, you’ll have a nice picture of Earth from space, which looks a lot like the default iOS wallpaper. When you launch Launchpad, the screen background is all blurry. Let’c clear it up.
Bring up Launchpad and then hit Control+Option+Command+B on your keyboard. This will switch it to a black and white photo. Hit that combo again and you’ll switch to a black and white blurry photo; hit it once more and you’ll have a clear color photo of the earth (or whatever background photo you’ve chosen.
Finally, start putting apps back into Launchpad. Go to the Finder and open the Applications folder. Drag the apps you want in your Launchpad to the icon of the Launchpad in your dock. Once you have all the apps you want, experiment with folders, iOS-style, by dragging one app on top of another app. You’ll have the opportunity to rename the folder, just like on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
Source: gnuu.
Source: OS X Daily
