Working on a writing workflow

I'm working on a book chapter. I'm still trying to organize my writing workflow so that it's streamlined, fast and stable. Unfortunately, although there are lots of software packages available for writing and research, they don't always play well together.

Endnote has been a thorn in my side for some time. Their upgrades are very expensive and it crashes Word 2008 (Mac) on a semi-regular basis. It's much better on the Windows side (Word 2007). I've tried using my Windows 7 Vmware Fusion guest for word processing (for those who haven't tried it, it's great to run both Windows and Mac at the same time!) but it's still clunky and slow for me to move files between the two OSes.

The most exciting tool for my writing lately is called Scrivener. It's a fantastic writing tool that's something like Ableton Live for Audio, you can easily drag and drop sections of your manuscript to create a more cohesive narrative. I find this flexible writing system very powerful and it allows a much more forgiving style of organization than Word.

Word, in general, while still looking very slick, is such a behemoth of a program, takes a while to load and crashes far too often for my liking. I prefer light and fast applications. Bean is another great option, but doesn't offer reference tool integration.

I've been experimenting with Bookends which apparently plays very well with Scrivener. This seems to be an excellent solution. Some of the power users are exporting from Scrivener to LaTeX and rendering there, but I don't think I'll go that route for now as I've seen how complex TeX can get at times. This week I'll keep writing in Scrivener and experiment with inserting references using Bookends.

The last thing I want to mention is the program Papers, it's a fantastic tool for grabbing journal articles but it's been frustrating me a great deal lately due to its clunky browsing system. It's impossible for me to add new tabs even though the developers say that it should be possible! I may have to reinstall it and see what happens...

All in all I would very much like to see more integration between these tools, with easy drag and drop reference management between programs. I want my citations to appear correctly no matter what program I use them in, with stable and light Word Processors providing backup. I hope that the Papers/Scrivener/Bookends system will work out well. The final export will probably be to Word but we'll see.

As always, any suggestions/comments very much appreciated!
Tim