I have over 2,000 iPhone apps now (nearly all of them free) saved on my hard drive, and I decided to offload some of them to secondary storage to free up some of the 8GB of disk space my iTunes folder was taking up. My initial delete process was to highlight an app in the Applications section of iTunes, hit Command-Delete and select Move to Trash from the pop-up dialog to put it in the Trash, then immediately rummage through the Trash to recover the file into a folder that I would later archive.
This works, but I felt I should probably optimize to get rid of the larger unused apps first (some of which are over 100MB on disk). I found that I could select any of the apps and hit Command-R on it to show me the file in Finder. The problem is that I wanted to go the other way -- sort that folder by size, and look at the fattest apps.
And here's where the problem lies ... the filename might be XMAS TREE, but the application in iTunes is Christmas Tree. It turns out that every app has four names: the name in the applications window, the name of the Finder file, the name in the applications scroll box (where you enable those apps you want loaded on the iPhone), and the name of the app once installed on the iPhone. Apparently there aren't any hard guidelines about how closely-related all these names need to be. Some of them are very similar, some of them are extremely different.
But, I stumbled across a slick trick. I found the fattest likely-unused app in the Finder, and then dragged it to the Application entry in the iTunes sidebar. The cursor turns into the green plus sign (like I'm copying the file), but it doesn't actually copy the file when I let go. Instead, something very useful happens: the corresponding app is selected!
2br
So my process is now: look for candidate app in Finder, drag it to the iTunes app window, decide if it's an app I want to archive, and if so, Command-Delete, Move to Trash, rummage through trash to move to my backup folder. It's not easy, but then again, I don't think Apple expected anyone to have 2,000 apps.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090827015544467