LaunchPad is the OS X Lion version of the old Launcher, or the iOS home screen, according to how you look at these things. A few notes on issues I’ve seen with LaunchPad. First, I’ve had to nuke LaunchPad and have it rebuild. To do so, delete the database.
rm ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/*.db
You might also need to kill the dock:
killall Dock
In a deployment scenario, I’ve started doing both as post flight tasks. Getting to the point where you’re granularly adding and removing items is done by editing the .db file in ~/Library/Application Support/Dock. In here is a generatedID followed by .db that makes up a SQLite database. This database can be managed using a number of SQLite management tools, such as Base or SQLite Inspector.
The management of databases from within these tools is pretty straight forward. You browse the apps, locate the offending rule and delete it. Then killall on the Dock (shown earlier) to actually have it disappear. You can also use the sqlite3 command line (where the string that begins with BF is the generated ID of the database):
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/BF222CEA-E6B2-4804-BAA2-DED0428E6C90.db "select * from apps"
Assuming you see a row in the output that you’d just love to get rid of, you can look at the bundleID and then get rid of it using a command like this:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/BF222CEA-E6B2-4804-BAA2-DED0428E6C90.db "DELETE from apps WHERE bundleid LIKE 'org.videolan.vlc'"
Don’t forget to kill the Dock afterwards. That’s basically it. If you install an app and then want to toss items from Launchpad as a post flight use the bundleID, run sqlite3 and then a second query to verify that the item is gone. As you don’t know the generatedID for the database name, you can also replace it with * in scripts:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps WHERE bundleid LIKE 'com.microsoft.uploadcenter'"
Oh, and the easy way to clean up LaunchPad is to use something like Launchpad Cleaner…
