Man this thread is kinda rediculous. I agree with Ken Auggie and kinda feel for him. I would start to feel like I'm going insane with so many responses from people suggesting to delete the application, and this guy William Lloyd repeatedly providing these lame responses that appear to be based on his assumptions of Launch Pad's intended functionality.
I don't think I'm special or anything, but I just wanna say that I work for a software company on the tech side of things... and that I feel that Ken is absolutely right. We are constantly taking DCR's (Design Change Requests) from our customers, to either change existing or create new features for our software. The intent of these kinda things is dictated by the desire to be intuitive and if it ends up failing at that, then it's not necisarily serving it's purpose well.
That being said, I do want to step back and say that I can clearly see and appreciate where Apple obviously seems to trade ease of use for minimal/cleanliness of design, and how things function... Kinda like a form/function tight rope.
I just don't get the point of saying, or where people come up with these dogmatic things like, "that's the way it is and you are trying to make it work in way that it was not designed". Take your mind out of its box. While I will tell someone that modifying a database will have to be done at your own risk, I will not tell them that expectations of how something should function, or trying to change it to meet your needs is wrong.
Here, I found out how to get it done on Mavericks based on the original command that Dannyboy3D mentions:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps WHERE title=‘insertappnamehere';" && killall Dock
Since the above was giving me some kind of error like "Your trying to do too many things at once", I decided to break up the steps a little and it worked....
First, open the terminal and navigate to the directory specified in the command above by typing the following:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock
Next, open a finder window and go to that location. Since your user-specific Library folder is hidden by default, you can go there by clicking on the "Go" menu at the top of the screen, holding down the Option key, and clicking Library when it appears.
Once you are in the "Dock" folder, you will see two .db files. These are databases. Essentially the command above would navigate to this directory and, for all databases, delete records titled 'Calculator' from the apps table and restart the dock.
Now that you are already in that directory, you can just do that deletion part one at a time by typing the following (note: you can drag one of the .db files from the finder window onto the Terminal window, after typing sqlite3 instead of having to type it out.):
sqlite3 7B313CFF-FF15-41AA-90FA-DE1DC21C3997.db "DELETE from apps WHERE title='Calculator';"
Do the same thing for the other .db file if you like. I recieved an error that there was no apps table in the other .db file (desktoppicture.db) when I tried it.
Now that the records titled 'Calculator' have been deleted from the apps tables, you'll just have to restart the dock by typing the following:
killall Dock
Oh and I forgot to mention a couple of important things.
You can of course wait to perform the "killall Dock" command until you have finished performing all of the deletions that you wish to perform.
More importantly, you can cause the whole line that you just typed to appear again by pressing the up arrow on the keyboard (or by pressing it two times if you have already executed the killall Dock command) and just left arrow back to the app name that you had specified after title= and replace it with the next intended deletion.
For example, press the up arrow and left arrow to the ' after Calculator, delete Calculator and replace it with System Preferences, leaving the single quotes in place.
Message was edited by: jimmyJonesJonson
