New Project

I've tried basecamp and actionmethod and these are pretty good tools. They are free and you should check them out. I use Microsoft project every day. Its not a good tool. I hate to say that, but its just a pain. There are other tools for sprinting all that, which are neat. If you have a good one, let me know, but either way, I'm writing a new one. We aren't selling tool, but it needs to do some things we want to do - basic stuff.
We want to track tasks, but we also need to report on tasks for the project. Actionmethod didn't have the team reporting we wanted. We also need to track the time spent on each item. The time reporting key for us. Basecamp had most of the features we wanted, but didn't have the time reporting. We looked at time reporting tools, but they were focused on tracking time and reporting it, but not really the task management.
The final straw was when using MS Project I tried to sort a plan by start date. Couldn't make it work in MS Project 2003. We have groups of tasks, that have summary tasks and a few columns of data. The report features in MS Project kept pushing the print out to two pages side by side. That is too much of a pain too. But the big deal was the sort was actually wrong. The summary tasks kept creating problems.
We just wanted an easy way to log in and see, what work do I have to do today. Then for the manager, what work got done this week and what is not getting done. So we can communicate with clients who might be impacted. Of course we need to bill hours so we need to track the time and we want to be able to analyze the time to make better estimates next time. Sounds so simple.
If you have a great tool for this, let me know. For now I'm building one in Ruby on Rails, I'll let you know how it goes.