I quite like Mac bundles like this that come around quite often - currently $9 for 10 apps, total list price over $280, should continue through February on a pay-what-you-like-ish basis.  As well as a few utilities that are particularly useful for web developers and some cleaning/backup utilities of value if you need them, this one includes Bookends (list price $60). That's a very good deal.

Bookends is a reference manager that is a very good match for the despicable EndNote, better in some ways. It is from a far more likeable and responsive company than Pearson that is not out to screw every last cent it can from you, sue open source developers, or lock up your data. It has fewer bugs and crashes and, if you mention any, they fix them, without charging you for the next update to do so. It is faster and (this is the killer feature for me) can not just import EndNote references but will re-use most of the unformatted citations from it in your existing documents (note that you need to unformat citations in EndNote first and the odd multiple or complex citation may need manual correction - happily, that feature still works even when EndNote itself has decided you need to buy a new copy if you want it to work again after upgrading your operating system).

I find Bookends to be slightly less intuitive when adding page numbers etc, and some of the reference formats are less flexible than EndNote's - it is not clever about volumes and issues in journals, for example - and it has fewer available templates, but you can build your own if you need them, and what comes in the box is more than enough for most purposes. Not as good value as Zotero (free and open) or perhaps, more arguably, Mendeley (free, but closed and data-grabbing) but it is a nice, usable, working reference manager with decent integration with not just Word etc but also many others, including Scrivener. When I was determined to get out of EndNote's drug-pusher marketing cycle - thanks to yet another totally pointless update the sole purpose of which was to force users of newer versions of Word to buy a new copy - but had a book in MS-Word format filled with EndNote citations that I was not keen to re-enter, this was my means of escape. Not only could I escape EndNote but Bookends, unlike EndNote, let me move Word docs back into Scrivener and retain all my citations active and intact. Nothing has made me want to return to Pearson's ugly clutches since, not even the convenience of simpler collaboration with EndNote addicts.

And it is so nice getting away a bit further away from the almost-as-awful MS-Word. One day soon I hope I can drop that altogether too. Microsoft's moves to a rental model/cloud model/both are likely to be the last straw for me on that one. Word has always been middle-of-the-pack at best in terms of genuinely useful features and near the bottom in terms of usability. It is a bug-ridden monstrosity that eats resources and gets in the way of productive work. The last version I liked at all was version 2, and that was nothing like as good as its then-competitor, the much-missed Ami Pro (which still knocks the socks off most modern word processors but got messed up by Lotus then murdered by IBM).  LibreOffice/OpenOffice is close enough to Word as makes no odds, but that is both a blessing and a curse- it really ought to be better and should copy something that actually works rather than chasing Microsoft's tail. Apple's Pages is far more coherent and for a while looked like the best solution, but Apple keeps changing it in ways that break or remove features that I need and like, often rendering older documents unusable in the process, so it's a total non-starter: plus they are more avaricious and sneaky in their use of the cloud than even Microsoft. Google Docs is cool - the collaboration features are brilliant, it works everywhere, and it does handle references well - but it's Google. I don't dislike the company on the whole and I admire their technologies, but I don't want to have to rely on them. They are historically at least as bad as Apple when it comes to removing vital services on a whim, they constantly tweak the features (not always for the better) and I don't like storing my documents in the US one bit. In fact, for some of my documents, it would be illegal to do so. Ditto the rest of the cloud folk, none of whom are a match for Google anyway.

If anyone knows any serious alternatives, please share! There appear to be droves of lightweight word processors (not enough - I write books, papers and reports and have to work with others that still use Word) and still a few expensive heavyweights - I notice with some astonishment that Corel are still making Wordperfect and charging a lot for it. Hard to see that as sustainable.  I love Scrivener for book writing and for lengthy papers but it's overkill for most things - everything is a project - and not compatible enough for daily use. I want something with the power and extensibility of Word (the real power, not the nonsense gadgetry) the usability and speed of Pages (with the assurance of it still working at least as well next year) and the elegance and collaborative features of Google Docs (without the cloud dependency or the strong chance of it disappearing or changing beyond recognition tomorrow). And, though I don't mind paying, I'd like it to be as open as LibreOffice (without the tortuously clunky Word-cloning obsession). Oh, and (if possible) it should work on Macs, Windows, Linux and, ideally, Android and iOS. Not much to ask for, really!