Making Launchpad "Better"

I have been a long-time lover of organizing my apps by folder and putting them in my dock to access them more quickly. With the advent of Launchpad in Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” (you don’t get it if you’re on an earlier version of OS X), I no longer need to clutter my dock with ten or more folders. The downside to Launchpad is that every application on your Mac ends up there. If you use Parallels, this is going to include all the useless Windows apps as well; this has been a huge source of irritation to me until now.

Thanks to the Redmond Pie blog, I’ve been introduced to a preference pane called Launchpad-Control, which will allow you to decide which applications show in Launchpad. Without this preference pane, you would have to delete an application from the computer to get it out of Launchpad. What the preference pane will do is give you a list of all the apps as well as the folders you’ve organized them into. In the preference pane, you can check or uncheck apps and folders; any apps and folders you uncheck won’t appear in Launchpad. In the case of the Windows applications, I moved them all into the folders, unchecked them in the preference pane and poof… no more pointless applications in Launchpad. Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Launchpad and the other iOS-like features of 10.7 are the way of the future. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Apple eventually merges iOS and OS X into a new operating system. It’s nice that third-party developers are making free applications that improve on Apple’s already solid operating system.