Of all the Launchpad tips and customizations, one that has been greatly desired is the ability to manually adjust the icon size of apps. A tip sent in by Rohan Agashe moves us in that direction, allowing you to change the Launchpad icon size down from the large icons in OS X 10.7.2 to the smaller Launchpad icons that were present in Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1.

This trick is limited to those who have an existing backup of Mac OS X 10.7.1 through Time Machine or otherwise. We are not going to provide old copies of Dock.app or the executable since it is part of OS X Lion and that would be against the EULA.



Shrink Launchpads Huge Icons Back to Small

As stated before, you will need a copy of Dock.app from OS X Lion 10.7.1. This will be stored in the Time Machine backup, or is accessible on Macs that haven’t been updated to 10.7.2 yet. After you have that:

Right-click on Dock.app from OS X 10.7.1 and choose “Show Package Contents”

Open “Contents” and then open “MacOS”

Copy the executable file “Dock” to your Mac OS X desktop

Now you’re going to replace the OS X 10.7.2 Dock executable with the older copy:

Hit Command+Shift+G and enter the following path:

/System/Library/CoreServices/ Locate and right-click on Dock.app and choose “Show Package Contents”

Open “Contents” and then open “MacOS”

Make a copy of “Dock” and name it “Dock-backup” and place this somewhere you can easily find it

Move the 10.7.1 copy of “Dock” executable to this folder, authenticate the change to overwrite the new version with the old

Launch the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)

Type the following command:

killall Dock Re-open Launchpad and enjoy the smaller icons

The original Dock file is backed up so you can return to the large Launchpad icon sizes if you want. You’ll need to continue to keep a copy of the 10.7.1 Dock.app for future OS X updates, unless of course Apple gives us manual controls over Launchpad icon size. In my view, the large icons look best with the motion blur, so if you like maximum fanciness stick with the huge icons.

Thanks to Rohan for the tip

Don’t forget to check out our OS X Lion tips archive for more.