So, Lion’s out! Woo hoo! If you’re like me, you saw a ton of crappy apps in Launchpad and was very disappointed to see that there’s no way to remove apps from Launchpad without having to delete them from your system.

Locating the Launchpad would have been a painful task, but thankfully the clever cookies at HaiTeq found the Launchpad SQLite database. To locate this SQLite database, navigate to:

~/Library/Application Support/Dock

In there, you’ll find a file with the name something similar to this:

D7A515C6-6523-48B8-9C83-DD737AC41C74.db

This file, as mentioned earlier, is a SQLite database file, and can be opened in any SQLite editor. I’m a huge fan of Base, I recommend you use it! Once you’ve opened the database file, select the apps table.

Inside the apps table, you’ll find all your applications listed in a nice list. I found it completely un-necessary to have a number of apps, like Chess.app, Image Capture.app, Time Machine.app etc. To remove the app from the Launchpad database, just select the appropriate app from the list and hit the delete button!

Now, if you open Launchpad straight away you won’t see the changes. To fix that, open Terminal.app and type in:

killall Dock

This restarts the Dock process, of which Launchpad is a child of. Now, open Launchpad and see the changes!

I managed to condense Launchpad from 3 pages, to one page of apps I actually want to have in Launchpad for quick access.

Notes:

If you accidentally delete the wrong app, I have not been able to figure out exactly how to re-add an app. So, make sure you delete the right app!