Apple picker Launchpad is certainly familiar to all of you, and there is no need to introduce it again. One of Launchpad's weakest points is probably the inability to remove application shortcuts. Only eight days have passed since the launch of OS X Lion, when a utility to remove this ailment saw the light of day - Launchpad Control.
Launchpad Control is available for free on the website chaosspace.de.
After downloading and unzipping the ZIP file from the above link, just install the application in System Preferences, run it, de-click unnecessary applications or folders and confirm with the button Apply. Then the Finder will be restarted and… done! Redundant icons from the Launchpad are removed.
The second, more laborious option is to remove all Launchpad apps via Terminal. Then you have to move them to the Launchpad icon in the Dock and add them back.
mkdir ~/Desktop/launchpad_backup
cp ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/*.db ~/Desktop/launchpad_backup/
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/*.db 'DELETE from apps; DELETE from groups WHERE title<>""; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;'
killall dockAuthors: Daniel Hruška and Rastislav Červenák
Regarding the impossibility of removing representatives, I only point to the option CMD ALT CTRL,
which arranges the possibility of uninstalling the shortcut (like from iOS - the icons move and there is a cross next to them - it does not work (I don't know why yet) for all applications - the same as on iOS - I can still understand the system one, but what the logic of the others is based on... I have no idea.
The cross is only for those purchased through the Mac Appstore...
The program drives me crazy, I uninstalled it and sorted it manually. I probably won't use it much anyway, it's not very fancy (launchpad).
I hope that Apple will solve it in one of the Updates, because it's really crazy that it doesn't work just as a representative of the applications that I want there, but I don't use the launchpad very often anyway, I don't know why, if only there was an icon instead of the applications folder :D I would have clicked on it, but habit is habit.