The relatively simple perl script mencal is not a very useful application: it basically displays a text-based calendar and highlights several days each month. That’s OK, I guess, but it’s not what I would expect from a real app. A period can vary in date and duration, and your predictions may be more or less accurate, so it really needs more flexibility. Also a GUI display would make it easier to use. A good mensturation application would have the following features:
- Integrate with Evolution for information display. Ideally implementation would be an EPlugin, but it could be a separate app that exported an icalendar file.
- Display predicted and actual menstruation dates separately.
- Improve its prediction algorithym as it is corrected by the user.
- Display days of ovulation, estimated maximum and minimum fertility and other hormonal events. Display of these events should be customizable.
- Export graphs of estimated hormone levels and fertility events.
I’d suggest that it be written in C# with Mono, like all the cool apps are these days. Besides, Evolution has great C# bindings.
That would be an app worth shipping!
Secretly Ironic 
Is this a joke?
It actually would be great to have a program like that integrated into the calendaring/email software of your choice. Most women who are that into monitoring either for conception or avoidance purposes use something like Fertility Friend or Ovusoft, which are web-based or standalone apps. I’d also suggest “Crank Alerts,” which are emails or SMS sent to a distribution list of romantic partners as the period approaches, or “Poppin’ Fresh,” as ovulation approaches.
Here’s some background info, as not everything you mention is realistic.
To meaningfully display days of ovulation, you need to give the user some place to plug in actual cycle data, as most woman do not have regular 28 day cycles and do not pop out an egg mid-cycle…It’s even trickier in that you can’t just count x number of days FROM the start of a period to pinpoint ovulation, you have to count BACK the number of days in your luteal phase from your next anticipated period (about 12-16 on average). So without months of data, it’s just a rough guess at best and not really helpful. Menstruation start dates in turn are based on the time that you ovulate because there are always a consistent # of days in the luteal phase, and stress and illness sometimes delay or suppress ovulation, which would in turn delay a period.
Ovulation is usually confirmed through monitoring of cervical fluid (this alone is known as the Billings Method), basal body temp shift (in conjunction w/ cf monitoring, this is usually called the Fertility Awareness Method), Ovulation Predictor Kits (OPKs), or saliva ferning on a microscope. It can also be confirmed via bloodwork at a doctor’s and ultrasound for those undergoing ART. Sooo… it is fairly complicated to be truly accurate for users beyond those on hormonal birth control who just want a reminder that their period will be here as they schedule their beach vacation. Of course you can always ballpark, but personally I feel that falls in the why bother having an app category.
I’m not sure what you mean by “estimated hormone levels.” To the average person, knowing you have x amount of estradiol or FSH means diddley. They also do not really rise in a predictable fashion. That would be most interesting to someone with a fertility issue shooting for an IUI or IVF, but those people are typically already monitored by a doctor through regular blood draws (every few days) just because that kind of sensitive stuff requires actual empirical data
Ok, I’m done being pedantic. I just happen to find this stuff interesting, and wish people understood the mechanics better. There probably isn’t something like this now because the requirements must be fairly daunting.
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No, not a joke. Mencal is really annoying, because it’s just a half-assed attempt. I guess it’s OK if you’re a UNIX hacker in the seventies with a perfectly regular period and an inability to remember to buy tampons. Honestly a proper menstruation/ovulation/fertility tracking application would be useful to many people and would send the message that Linux developers care about women.
I suppose you’re right that hormone level estimation is probably not worth it then.
But fertility prediction would be much more useful than just estimating whether you’re going to be menstruating during vacation or whatever. Fertility tracking and prediction involves a lot of data, and it could be tracked better in a calendar-integrated application than in a mere spreadsheet. Although I guess a pen and paper works fine too. But computers would be cooler!
The app should definitely let you enter your measured data and then tell you when it thinks ovulation happened and when, assuming that this month is like last month, it might happen again. The predictions definitely need to be kept apart from the corrections– so it would peg the estimated ovulation date and menstruation dates, and then when you correct its mensturation estimates it should go back and note that ovulation would have happened on a different day from what it predicted.
It could have two modes, I guess– one for predicting fertility and one for just telling you whether to pack tampons for the trip to the beach.
PMS predictions would be fun, too. You could export those to a different calendar and post it so anyone who wanted to avoid your wrath could subscribe to it and know when to be extra nice. You could put them up on icalshare.com.
This would so rock. I’ll have to start studying fertility and C# now.
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