Project Management Roadblock with mac

Question

I love my mac! I always have loved my macs. I mainly used my macs for personal which is mostly multimedia world.
For the past 6 months I have kicked my work provided Dell to the curb and am using my mac for everything business related with some snags (most are overcome with work arounds).
After using my mac in the business world I have come to the conclusion Apple needs to come out with an Office of there own.
Sure, the skimpy Microsoft Office is nice (slow) but nice for word, excel and powerpoint but what about the other pieces of Microsoft Office that are not included like Visio and Project. These are key applications that I have not found a very good substitute.
I have tried replacing Project with:
OmniPlan 1.1
ConceptDraw Project 3
FastTrack Project 9
Project X
Merlin 2
Daylite3
All of which are nice for basic project management but some are clumsy, some are nice but not advanced enough.
My current project is to migrate the networks at branches all across the world.
I am given the DayOne date for each branch. DayOne is defined as the day the customers/users come into the office and are using the new network for the very first time. So, its the end date of each milestone.
So working backwards from DayOne (always a Monday)
Task1: 3days prior to DayOne, Begin Migration (Task Length: Friday at 6pm there local time until 5am Monday there local time at the latest)
Task2: 5days prior to DayOne, Send out a FINAL cadence (Task Length: 30minutes and always on a Wednesday at 4pm eastern time)
Task3: 7days prior to DayOne, Verification that everything is set (Task Details: 1hour and always on a Monday at 1pm-2pm eastern time)
Task4: 17days prior to DayOne, Requests are submitted (Task Details: Request/Change Controls are submitted and always on a Friday at 9am est for 1hour)
Task5: 30days prior to Dayone, Submit cadenance is sent to all teams (Task Details: Helps everyone get on same page, done at 3pm est for 30min on Mondays)
Task6: 30days prior to Dayone, Red Team Review of cadenance (Task Details: Review cadenance with all teams, North America version done at 11am every Monday 30+days prior to dayone, Europe version done 30+ days prior to dayone on Thursdays at 8am est)
Task7: 60+days prior to Dayone, Draft Cadenance is emailed (Task Details: Draft cadenance is sent out every Tuesday 60+days out from dayone at 3pm est for 2hours)
A TRUE Project Management software I should be able to create the tasks above and change the DayOne date (as I received these changes) and all Tasks should shift accordingly and they do not (without any limitation). There should also be the possibility to turn on/off the today date restriction (in the case I would like to track tasks that happened in the past).
I would love to see Apple create an Office suite that does Office right. No limits... shoot for Pluto.

Answer 1

Hi Countrymac,
A couple of suggestions:
For Project Management, take a look at the package iTaskX - at first glance it looks promising - it includes effective task linking like end-to-start, start-to-start etc., and it seems intuitive (at least at my first glimpse). A no-cost trial version (no file saving or printing) is available for downloading at:
http://shareit.com/product.html?cart=1&productid=300022429&affiliateid=200003270
For an Office suite try NeoOffice, the (shareware) open source product adapted especially for the Mac from the also open source "Open Office". Download and further info is available at:
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/download.php#requirements
Hope that helps! Cheers