A problem I have with Launchpad (and the SpringBoard on iOS) is that while you can rearrange and group apps, sometimes you just want to hide apps or get rid of them completely. This is possible on iOS via a Jailbreak, but how can we hide unnecessary apps and folders in Launchpad on the Mac? Andreas Ganske’s Launchpad-Control is your ticket to greater control.

Launchpad-Control is super simple to use. Download it, unzip the archive, and drag the icon to your Applications folder in your Finder’s sidebar. When you open Launchpad-Control, you’re presented with a list of all the apps displayed in your Launchpad. Simply uncheck the folders or apps you don’t want to see, click Apply, then wait as your dock is killed and comes back into view. When you own open Launchpad, all of the apps you wanted to hide will no longer be active. It’s so simple to use, but fair warning: using this app comes at your own risk!

You can download Launchpad-Control from http://chaosspace.de/. Remember to donate if you find this free utility useful!

[via @ChaosCoder]

Maybe you’re new to Lion (welcome newly acquainted Mac users), or maybe you’re not much of a Mail user to begin with. Well, “Hello From Cupertino, CA”! Much of the hype around Lion has revolved around the iOS-inspired changes made to Mail, which aims to make reading messages, composing email, and navigating through conversations really easy. To do this, Mail likes to hide the Mailbox List, while getting you comfortable with the new Favorites Bar. Lion’s new vertical message list and message-preview pane better make use of wide-screen displays, especially while full-screen. If you’re not familiar with this terminology yet, don’t worry. Grab a cup of coffee, your favorite morning or afternoon pastry, and get ready to set up Lion with your account.

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We briefly touched upon the improvements to Quick Look in our Lion review last week, speaking of the improvements made to it in broad strokes. But we felt as though it was worth a second look because there have been quite a few improvements, including many that are subtle but really nice touches.

New Look
The biggest change is of course the refreshed look, which Cody described in the review as “painted in a new white lacquer compared to the smokey previews in Leopard and Snow Leopard”. The reaction to this change has been both positive and negative, but broadly speaking we think it’s a good change, it feels cleaner and more refined – gone is that thick and wasteful bar at the bottom of the Quick Look window.

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Lion is a solid update to OS X and it comes with several new features as we’ve outlined in our review, however there are so many little touches and minor features it is possible some of them will go unnoticed, leaving a user wondering whether something he thought would be possible was removed by Apple. In this post, we’ve collected some of the best tips and tricks we’ve received from our readers and Twitter followers since Lion came out yesterday, as well as stuff that didn’t make it to the review. More will follow throughout the next days, but in the meantime check them after the break.

Note: Part 2 is now online.

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Whether I’m installing OS X for myself or for another person, there’s always several things I do first before anything else. The steps I take aren’t too different in Lion, and whether you’re getting a new Mac, finding ways to install Lion fresh, or looking to see if you’ve missed anything, let’s take a quick five minute tour of the OS’s settings.

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Apple today released Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and it is the first release of OS X to be distributed primarily through a digital channel. That digital channel, the recently released Mac App Store, is the main way in which Apple is selling Lion.

To help you (or perhaps a family member or friend who may need a little guidance) with the various installation methods, and how the Mac App Store changes things, we’ve prepared the following post. In this article we include a step-by-step guide for the typical Lion upgrade process, explain what the new Recovery Partition is, how to make your own bootable Lion Installation media, how to do a clean Lion installation and a helpful Q&A section.

So jump after the break to see the full article and learn more than you would want to know about the Lion installation process.

Contents

To make things as simple as possible we have split this article into several sections so you can jump right to the section you most want/need to learn about. So as a side note to those who wish to read the whole article, be warned some parts and information is repeated multiple times.

1. Introduction to Mac App Store Distribution of Lion
2. The Simple Upgrade Installation (from Snow Leopard)
3. The Recovery Partition, What Is It?
4. Making Your Own Bootable Media
5. The Quasi-Clean Installation
6. The Completely Clean Installation
7. Q & A

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When I first covered the 4.5 update for Airfoil, which added extended AirPlay support and remote controls for compatible apps, a reader suggested an interesting hack or, better, workflow for wireless audio in the comments: given Airfoil’s capability of sending audio from a single source to multiple speakers or devices at once, it was possible to send audio from iOS to the Mac using AirServer, and then pass along data from AirServer (which acts as an AirPlay receiver on the Mac) to speakers recognized by Airfoil. Later, another reader chimed in to say that, considering Airfoil’s recent improvements, there was no need to install a separate app — Airfoil Speakers itself could handle the AirPlay stream from iOS to OS X, and then be used as an input source in Airfoil. When combined with an app like Reemote, this setup would allow you to send audio from an iPhone or iPad to the Mac wirelessly, from the Mac to another set of speakers or computers, and then control everything from iOS. (more…)

When The Omni Group brought OmniOutliner to the iPad, they didn’t just create an outlining app for text and field notes. While useful for preparing research, taking notes, and organizing ideas, OmniOutliner can adapt to a variety of needs and circumstances with relative ease. Combined with a personal desire for customization, OmniOutliner can be tailored to solve a variety of creative problems such as the one we’re looking at today.

The flexibility in OmniOutliner can be admired when we apply a real world scenario such as tracking your daily spending. Mint might be useful for telling you how you spend your money, but nothing beats your own checklist when it comes time to compare the month’s expenditures against a bank statement. Writing your purchases down enables you to catch maintenance charges, find fraudulent activity, and become better aware of your current financial status. With paper likely being a rarity in our lives thanks to the iPad, OmniOutliner fits the bill nicely.

The tutorial past the break will teach you how to modify a provided template to your liking; you’ll learn how styles work in OmniOutliner; we’ll cover date, number, and pop-up columns; and lastly we’ll put it all together to make something terrific. Even if you have zero interest in tracking your spending, this tutorial will help you learn quite a bit about how OmniOutliner’s features fit together quite beautifully.

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Here’s an interesting tip about the OS X dock I absolutely didn’t know about, which was brought to our attention by OS X Daily. With a simple Terminal command, you can create a new “smart” stack item in your dock that will automatically collect your most recent applications, servers you’ve connected to, documents, volumes and Favorite items. The stack — which needs to be manually enabled — comes in handy if you’re looking for a quick way to re-open items you’ve recently launched — and especially for Servers and Volumes, this means the stack is collecting my most used items, not just the recent ones.

To enable the recents menu, type this in the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

Then, to relaunch the Dock:

killall Dock

The new stack will automatically be placed in the rightmost section, next to the Trash. To remove it, simply drag it out of the Dock. I like this menu because it’s making me save lots of time that would have been spent into the Finder otherwise (the method above worked just fine for me on Snow Leopard 10.6.7). Check out more screenshots below.

Update: if the Terminal command throws you a syntax error, make sure to copy the plain text from OS X Daily.

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I love iTunes Home Sharing. Introduced almost two years ago with iTunes 9, Home Sharing allows you to share your music and movies, TV shows, podcasts and playlists with friends and family on a local network. With an active Internet connection and an Apple ID configured with the iTunes Store, you’ll be able to easily share your entire iTunes library and enable other users to connect to your iTunes installation to stream songs, video files, and so forth. It is a great feature of iTunes, and with the latest iOS 4.3 update for iPhone and iPad it also works exceptionally well with mobile devices: once activated on the desktop, your entire iTunes library will be sent to the iOS iPod app without the need of syncing or manually copying anything. Just make sure you’re on the same WiFi network, and you’re all set. (more…)