I absolutely loathe MS Project, but for large projects it does one thing well that I haven't found in other desktop packages: it does a passable job of supporting effort-based planning. There are lots of good enterprise-class planning projects like HP PPM and whatever Oracle renamed Primavera to. But they're very expensive.

Since I went Mac, I began running MS Project under Crossover Office. It's un-Macish and still just as awful, but it works.

Serena has OpenProj it is a Project knock off but has much of the same feature set. I use it to look at project schedules and make modification to MS Project files that project managers send to me. It is not pretty but it does the trick. I am on a Mac as well. I have heard a lot of raving about basecamp but I have never used it so I cannot speak for it.

http://openproj.org/openproj

I've had some success with Tracks - http://www.getontracks.org/ You can even get a turnkeylinux version with it and run it ASAP in VM http://www.turnkeylinux.org/tracks (that's how I run it). Sure, it's not MS Project, but I like it.

I use a large whiteboard and lots of post-it pad. Write the tasks on the post-it and stick it on the whiteboard. Rearrange it accordingly. Anytime I want to work on things, I just take a post-it with me and work on it on my laptop.

Try:

http://www.digite.com