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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2013. Every day (except Sunday) from mid-July until late September, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a standout free or low-cost program. You can view a list of this year’s apps, updated daily, on our handy GemFest page, and you can visit the Mac Gems homepage for past Mac Gems reviews.
OS X’s Launchpad was derided when it first appeared in OS X Lion. It was part of the then-new iOS-ification of OS X: It closely mimicked the iOS homescreen full of icons, through which you’d scroll sideways to find and launch the apps you wanted. Back then, our own Dan Frakes called it, “Lion’s most misguided adoption of an iOS feature.”
Time has mellowed that initial disdain. In the intervening years, I’ve seen the occasional shy admission from a variety of Mac users that they’ve come to rely on Launchpad as at least one way they open their apps. If you don’t use a keyboard-based launcher, if you prefer to keep your hand on the mouse or trackpad, Launchpad can actually be a handy way to open your apps—particularly if you’ve grown accustomed to the iOS way of doing things.
But Launchpad still has one big flaw: It doesn’t have any good built-in tools for arranging those app icons the way you want them. You have to manually drag icons from one screen to another (or onto one another to create groups).
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