Whilst there are many sites that track the compatibility on common desktop applications, it is often difficult to find out information about scientific applications. Based on the number of page views on the lists for Sierra, El Capitan and Yosemite it is apparently a useful resource. The major change with High Sierra is the update to the file system so hopefully this will be a benign update, but a Time Machine backup is always a good idea.

I’ll update the list regularly and feel free to send in information.

High Sierra is a major download 5GB and a couple of people have asked if it is possible to keep the installer and then use it on multiple machines.

The initial installer is small (15 MB) but after the main installer has successfully downloaded (5GB+), when you are prompted to start the installation process, click Cancel, and the installer will be in the /Applications folder. You must make a copy of this to another location; otherwise if you launch the installer and it completes the High Sierra update, it'll be deleted.

When you upgrade to macOS High Sierra, systems with all flash storage configurations are converted automatically. Systems with hard disk drives (HDD) and Fusion drives won't be converted to APFS. You can't opt-out of the transition to APFS.

AppleScriptObjC there are a couple of bugs, because the issues stem from the .bridgesupport file, they will potentially pose problems in other languages that use the scripting bridge.

Avogadro no issues

BBEdit have a comprehensive list of compatibility notes for each application and versions https://www.barebones.com/support/new-os.html. BBEdit 12 has just been released which bring full High Sierra compatibility.

ChemDoodle all seems fine no issues reported

ChemDoodle3D all seems fine no issues reported

ChemDraw as a policy they do not test until after new operating systems have been released, will check back later

ChirysView no issues to date

Cresset No issues to date, more detailed testing underway.

CrystalMaker no problems

DataWarrior no issues to date

Findings no issues

iBabel no issues to date

MarvinSketch latest version no issues, earlier versions may require the old Apple supplied JDK to be reinstalled

MarvinView no issues

Microsoft have already announced the results of preliminary testing of the Office suite.

Office version 15.35 and later, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote will install and run on 10.13, but there maybe some issues

Office 15.34 and earlier. These versions are not supported on 10.13. In some cases, you may not be able to launch the Office apps.

Office for Mac 2011. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Lync have not been tested on macOS 10.13 High Sierra, and no formal support for this configuration will be provided.

Mnova lite no issues reported

MOE There seem to be no problems running MOE 2016.0804 or higher on MacOS 10.13.

Please note that all of our Mac users should upgrade to MOE 2016.0804 due to bugs identified in earlier versions. You can download the patch to 2016.0804 http://www.chemcomp.com/support/12/moebin_2016.0804.tgz

The default python is

 ~ /usr/bin/python
Python 2.7.10 (default, Jul 15 2017, 17:16:57) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 9.0.0 (clang-900.0.31)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

PyCharm no issues

StarDrop Our initial tests suggest that everything is working as expected.

Vortex no issues reported.

xQuartz "I would like to report that xquartz now works in the latest macOS 10.13". Download here https://www.xquartz.org.

Updated 14 October 2017

 

BBEdit everyone's favourite text editor has been updated. This looks to be a substantial update with over 100 new features and refinements, the full release notes are available here.

A couple of features look very useful

There's a new submenu on the Edit menu, "Columns". This submenu contains commands to help you work more easily with column-delimited text files. The three basic commands, "Cut Columns", "Copy Columns", and "Clear Columns" work similarly to their top-level analogues. The columns to be cut/copy/cleared are determined by the selection range: to cut a single column, for example, click in the middle of it. You can cut/copy/clear multiple columns by selecting text across them. The "Rearrange Columns" command gives you an easy way to, well, rearrange the columns in a column-delimited text document. Choose the menu command, and then drag the items into the list to order them as you would like, then press the "Apply" button.

There's a new command on the Text menu: "Canonize". This command is useful for doing batch search-and-replace operations in a file, using another file as a list of search-and-replace transformations.

BBEdit 12.0 requires macOS 10.11.6 ("El Capitan") or later, and is compatible with macOS 10.13 "High Sierra". I've added it to the list of Scientific Applications under High Sierra

 

The new version of Xcode is available for download. Xcode 9.0 includes Swift 4 and SDKs for iOS 11, watchOS 4, tvOS 11 and macOS High Sierra 10.13.

• The source code editor has been completely rebuilt for amazing speed. It scrolls at a constantly smooth rate, no matter the files size, also supports Markdown.
• Refactoring to easily select and modify structure of code
• Swift 4 compiler can also compile Swift 3 to aid transition
• Xcode 9 makes working with source control – and with GitHub – easier and more tightly integrated.
• Simulator app updated.

 

Apple have announced a major new update of Mac OS X, version 10.13 High Sierra has a number of significant changes and it is likely that applications may need to be updated. Beta test versions of the operating system have been available for a while now and the more proactive developers have already been testing their software. Unfortunately there will always be developers who seem to refuse to test their applications until the new Mac OS has been officially released.

Microsoft have already announced the results of preliminary testing of the Office suite.

Office version 15.35 and later, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote will install and run on 10.13, but there maybe some issues

Office 15.34 and earlier. These versions are not supported on 10.13. In some cases, you may not be able to launch the Office apps.

Office for Mac 2011. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Lync have not been tested on macOS 10.13 High Sierra, and no formal support for this configuration will be provided.

 

Apple have updated the online support documentation to give more details about the new file system (APFS) that is coming with the next generation of the operating system High Sierra. Apple File System (APFS), is the default file system in macOS High Sierra for Mac computers with all flash storage, it is designed to scale from an Apple watch to a Mac Pro.

Apple File System is a new, modern file system for iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. It is optimized for Flash/SSD storage and features strong encryption, copy-on-write metadata, space sharing, cloning for files and directories, snapshots, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives, and improved file system fundamentals. APFS replaces HFS+ as the default file system for iOS 10.3 and later, and macOS High Sierra and later.

A few things that might be important to note.

• When you upgrade to macOS High Sierra, systems with all flash storage configurations are converted automatically. Systems with hard disk drives (HDD) and Fusion drives won't be converted to APFS. You can't opt-out of the transition to APFS.
• FileVault volumes are converted from HFS+ to APFS, just like unencrypted volumes.
• Devices formatted as HFS+ can be read and written to by devices formatted as APFS.
• Devices formatted as APFS can be read and written to by any APFS-formatted devices but only by HFS+ formatted devices running macOS 10.12.6 or later.
• Volumes formatted with APFS can't offer share points over the network using AFP. SMB and NFS are supported when using APFS. The option to enforce only SMB-encrypted share points is also available.

What are the advantages?

• APFS supports 64-bit inode numbers, supporting over 9 quintillion files on a single volume
• APFS is optimized for SSD storage, it will work with traditional hard disk drives as well.
• No need to repartition, APFS allows Space Sharing, which lets multiple file systems share the same underlying free space on a physical volume rather than use a fixed amount of space for each file system.
• APFS supports sparse files, extended file attributes and TRIM operations, as well as using a copy-on-write metadata scheme to ensure that updates to the file system are crash-safe.
• Apple File System supports encryption natively, both single key encryption and multi-key encryption (where each file is encrypted with a separate key, and metadata is encrypted with a different key).

It is almost certain that any third party disc utilities will need to be updated. Once upgraded to APFS the only way to return to HFS+ is to erase the disc losing all data.

APFS implements normalization and case insensitivity according to the Unicode 9.0 standard; this enables APFS to support a wider range of languages for these features than HFS+, which is based on Unicode 3.2. However beta testers report issues with languages that include non-Roman characters. Hopefully this will be addressed soon.