Latest news with #contacts
Android Authority
10-07-2025
- Android Authority
My Galaxy phone was missing this crucial Contacts feature, but I found a workaround
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority There aren't many tasks the latest Android phones can't assist with, which makes it all the stranger when you discover some fundamental functionality missing. This happened to me recently, when I finally got around to cleaning up my contacts list. The chore would be made a whole lot easier if I could sort my contacts by the date I added them, but I realized that this isn't something you can do. When this issue comes up online, people usually want to look up recent contacts, such as someone they added to their phone the week before, but whose name has since slipped their mind. I have almost the opposite problem. As someone who runs a longstanding pick-up soccer game, I find myself adding dozens of players to my list each year, some of whom have the same first names. Knowing the date they were added to my contacts would let me easily skip back a couple of years and purge the ones who have long since stopped playing. Have you ever needed to sort your phone contacts by date added? 0 votes Yes NaN % No NaN % If only it were that easy. Both the Samsung Phone app and Google Contacts app on my Galaxy S24 Plus don't record this contact info, so it certainly isn't something by which you can sort your list. It's the same deal on my Google Pixel 8, and some Googling suggests it isn't something that any flagship device offers as standard. This seems like a huge blind spot. The best you can do with the common apps is look into your call logs or messaging apps for clues, but it's a messy approach and relies on you contacting each new addition soon after they were added. After more investigation, I finally found a better (if imperfect) workaround. The approximate workaround Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority Cursory research suggests that a perfect solution doesn't exist, at least unless you're a developer or are looking to start the record now. However, some little-known apps on the Play Store can offer assistance. There are almost certainly more, but the two apps I found that came close to solving my problem are Quis and Recent Contacts. As well as by first and last name, both of these apps offer you the chance to sort contacts by date added. Both apps got most of my contacts into an approximate order. The reason neither app could fully solve my issue is the big caveat in their Play Store blurbs. In both cases, it's clear that the order in which your contacts are added is only recorded with complete accuracy after the app has been installed, so neither can tell you the date on which contacts were added pre-installation. That said, they're far from useless. Both apps try to estimate the order of older contacts using the Raw ID, a behind-the-scenes value that usually reflects the order in which contacts were added. Contact merges, syncs across devices, and transfers from other accounts can all shuffle or reset these IDs, making the sequence unreliable, especially for older entries. However, I didn't need a perfect order for my purposes, and found that both apps broadly got most of my contacts into an approximate order by time period — certainly sufficient to quickly see the majority of older entries that have been clogging up my list. How to sort your contacts by date added Both Quis and Recent Contacts are easy apps to use. Quis is the more basic of the two and appears built by an enthusiastic amateur, although I prefer it for my purposes, as Recent Contacts includes adverts. Here's the brief process on each app to sort your contacts by date added. Quis Download the Quis app from the Play Store. Press Next on the notice about contact access, and allow the app to access your contacts. When you see your contacts, tap the Sort icon at the top right, represented by a list and an arrow. Choose Chronological then approximative in the pop-up Sort order menu. You should now see most of your recently added contacts near the top of the list, with the those near the bottom largely representing the earliest entries. If the contact also has a postal address associated with their entry, you can also see a map view showing where they live. Recent Contacts Download the Recent Contacts app from the Play Store. Open the app and allow it to access your contacts. Your contacts should already be ordered by date added (latest to oldest). If not, hit the Sort icon at the top right, with the same icon image as in Quis. You can now choose Date Added with either the latest or oldest first, or order by Date Last Modified.
The Sun
24-06-2025
- The Sun
WhatsApp introduces major change after a decade – but users are saying it ‘hurts their eyes'
WHATSAPP'S new update has been slammed by fans who say it is 'hurting their eyes'. The update has radically changed the app's appearance, bringing it closer to other versions of WhatsApp. 2 2 WhatsApp's new look is a sleek all-black design, with redesigned tabs. Previously, the user interface had a blue-grey colour and lines to separate various chats. The huge overhaul was intended to make it easier for users to swap between chats and applies to the web version of WhatsApp. The change brings the desktop version closer to the mobile app. Upon opening Whatsapp after the update, users are greeted with a message which reads: 'Starting today, we're introducing a brand new design for WhatsApp Web. 'You'll notice that some things look completely different but everything works the same as before.' However, the huge redesign has divided fans. Some have praised the app's new look, saying that it is 'beautiful'. Another gushed: 'I love this new WhatsApp look and feel.' Others were much more upset. WhatsApp reveals exacty how to block one of your contacts One complained that the redesign was "hurting my eyes' and another wrote 'what the f*** is the new WhatsApp web look'. Users aren't able to change their WhatsApp background on their desktop, unlike on their mobile. It is also impossible for fans to update their status on their desktop. The news comes after Facebook users were warned to make an important change to stop their chats becoming public. Like WhatsApp, Facebook is owned by Meta who have developed the highly advanced MetaAI. When users click 'share' or 'post to feed' when using the AI, they are actually sharing this with thousands of strangers. Meta has now implemented a new pop-up warning which asks users to agree to their chats landing on the app's discovery page.
The Drive
23-05-2025
- Automotive
- The Drive
I Loved Driving at Night, Until a Rare Condition Changed Everything
The latest car news, reviews, and features. The night my vision changed, I was driving home from my girlfriend's place. Lights became cloudy streaks; letters and numbers on green highway signs repeated in trails. It was a lot like waking up really dehydrated, when you're acutely aware of how dry your eyes are. In such situations, I'd typically rub them, but I had contacts in and no backup pair of glasses, so that wasn't going to work here. No amount of blinking set things back in alignment. I drove for about 40 minutes, got home, and got into bed. My eyes would feel better in the morning, I thought. Why wouldn't they? It's been three-and-a-half years since then, and my eyes still don't feel right. Fixing them has entailed so many doctor's visits that I've lost count, and eye drops made from my own blood that insurance doesn't cover. But that's skipping ahead. Ever since I began driving, I loved to do it at night. That's become less fun over time due to the onset of LEDs and everyone driving trucks, but this condition has pretty much ruined one of my greatest pleasures. When I woke up the morning after that drive home, I couldn't immediately tell anything was amiss until I sat down at my desk to write. Had my monitor always been this bright? And why did simply looking at it give me a headache? Clearly, I needed to rest my eyes, so I went for a walk outside. Breaks didn't help, and after a few days of this, I realized something was seriously wrong. Driving home on that very first night, my vision kind of felt like this. Mint Images via Getty Images What I'd come to learn (but not before several erroneous diagnoses) was that I had something called corneal neuropathy. Confocal imaging, using a special microscope that could get a look at the nerves that sheet the surface of my eye, showed an alarming lack of them. Nerve endings are supposed to show up like straight-ish squiggles, and mine were faint, kinked, or marred with fuzzy, balled-up clusters; these had responded to whatever trauma my eyes had undergone by regrowing malformed. But in a less technical sense—and the words of one of my ophthalmologists—the nerves in my eyes were ' pissed off .' Corneal neuropathy is like any kind of neuropathy, in that it presents in strange, unique ways for every individual because the human body is a pseudopredictable mess. If you're looking for yet more ways to depress yourselves on the daily, peruse the r/dryeye subreddit. Some folks there have classic dry eye syndrome, which can be debilitating enough on its own; three doctors diagnosed me with the condition while noting that I was far too young to have it. Others in the community have unrelenting, excruciating pain, despite tear ducts that behave perfectly normally, which sometimes goes hand-in-hand with cluster migraines. Corneal neuropathy happens to go by many names, and one of them is neuropathic dry eye; a patient might feel like their eyes are dry, when every possible form of examination indicates that they aren't. Fortunately, my neuropathy does not present as debilitating pain. My eyes feel gritty much of the time, sure, but for the most part, it's a minor annoyance I can deal with by wearing glasses instead of contact lenses and liberally applying over-the-counter tears. Unfortunately , it presents as perpetual sensitivity to highly concentrated, artificial sources of light, more so than broad sunlight. And this brings us to why my experience is here on The Drive , rather than in a case study in the American Journal of Ophthalmology. Though if you look hard enough on Reddit, you might be able to find my story there, too. You may have noticed that modern headlights are bright. They're so bright that even people with healthier eyes than mine are fed up. The problem is twofold. On one hand, today's LED headlights are indeed brighter and emit cooler light than the halogen lamps of 20 years ago. But—and this part tends to get lost in the conversation—car design also plays a role. As vehicles get larger and ride taller, their lights that used to mostly point downward, illuminating the path ahead, now project directly into the retinas of anyone driving anything smaller and lower. You could fight fire with fire and replace your daily with something equally elevated, but that doesn't really fix the problem, and besides, we enthusiasts like to drive what we like. All that is to say that right now is a seriously frustrating time to drive at night for many people. For some dry-eye sufferers, phantom or otherwise, it's harder still. Teenagers appreciate the freedom of driving when they get their learner's permits but of course, after a while, you take it as a given that a car enables you to go anywhere, at any time, limited only by distance and fatigue. But when every streetlamp has a hazy glow to it; when every road sign seems just a touch less sharp; when you can't seem to make the interior lights dim enough; when you have to start positioning your car with a generous buffer zone before oncoming traffic passes because you know you're about to be effectively blind for a second or two; when the night seems darker than you can ever recall, you start avoiding things. One strange side-effect for me through all this is that driving in the rain actually makes my eyes feel more normal. An expert might be able to tell me why, but I'd guess that rain gives my brain an explanation for its cloudy or distorted vision. RifatHasina via Getty Images Sometimes I'd be aware of my avoidance, and sometimes I wouldn't. If I needed to run around the corner to a grocery store to get that one ingredient we'd forgotten for dinner, I might ask my partner to drive. It was the same for long trips through the night. Sometimes, my eyes might feel a little more comfortable than usual, and I'd be more willing to try. Other times, I'd wonder if I was a danger to myself, anyone riding with me, and anyone I shared the road with. Those are depressing questions to ask yourself. But the especially insidious part was how early on in this journey, dread would set in every night, and I never knew why. It might hit me with the passing of the day, or when I'd go to take out the trash. Of course, I didn't realize what I'd actually been dreading—the loss of freedom and the inability to easily do something I love. Through most of my 20s, I'd guess more than half of my driving happened after the sun went down. I honestly preferred it that way. That was partially down to having a job at a newspaper production office, where I wouldn't go home until we sent content to the presses. But those first few years out of college were full of late hangs with friends, impromptu Wawa runs, and trips to and from basement shows. I usually had the most fun when I was going somewhere at night. And when I had the car to myself, it was therapeutic. There's still no greater solitude to me than being alone on a back road; that's when I most deeply feel the joy of driving. I don't necessarily have to be going fast either, and trust me, along the Delaware River, that's the perfect way to inadvertently control the deer population. At night, the world is only ever as large as what my headlights can see, and that's a pretty comforting feeling. Corneal neuropathy almost destroyed it, and for the last several years, I doubted I'd ever get it back. When I was diagnosed with this condition, a doctor told me the only thing that was likely to help was autologous serum eye drops (ASEDs). These drops are a combination of serum from the patient's own blood, and saline. Doctors prescribe different concentrations of serum and recommend different regimens for every patient (for what it's worth, I'm on a 20% concentration eight times a day), but the principle here is that, unlike artificial tears, ASEDs 'share many of the same biochemical properties as real tears,' per Medical News Today , and contain even higher concentrations of biological nutrients like vitamin A, proteins, and transforming growth factor than natural tears do. That stimulates healing when nerves in the eye struggle to heal on their own. I tried ASEDs, alongside fancy glasses, occasional steroids, and a host of different drugs that target chronic nerve pain, on and off, for two years. Serum tears are expensive—I pay $400 for a three-month dose, and insurance doesn't cover them, because why would they? I'd pass on refills because I wasn't seeing the results I hoped for, and couldn't stomach the expense. It already angered me that I was ripping through $20 bottles of normal eye drops every three weeks; $400 for a treatment I wasn't sure was helping and made travel an absolute pain (you've got to keep them cold all the time , and I fly a lot) was an indignity for someone who used to pride themselves on needing nothing but coffee and Advil in the morning. Every three months, I get a box of these little vials full of eye drops made from my own blood serum. They arrive frozen, and when I travel, I put a bottle or two in that insulated tumbler and fill up the rest of the space with plastic ice cubes. TSA hasn't given me grief yet! Adam Ismail It took a long time to admit that this was just my life now, and I might see results if I just stayed the course of treatment. I shifted to a different ASED and drug regimen, and today, I feel like I'm doing a little better. Imaging of my corneas backs that up—more squiggles, less fuzzy balls. If you asked me precisely what 'a little better' feels like, it's definitely not 'healthy.' Headlights still have clouds and feel like they take up too much space and create too much noise in my visual field. But it's all a smidge less overwhelming. My doctor isn't even satisfied with my pace of improvement and believes I should be further along than I am now. At this point, I'm just content to be improving at all. All this has been a tremendous inconvenience at best, and a deeply personal, often unrelatable-feeling source of anxiety and panic at worst. It's impacted every facet of my life, but it's notably reshaped my relationship with something I love to do, which I've also essentially based a career around. I have regrets that I wish I'd taken better care of my eyes, or somehow enjoyed those late drives more than I knew to at the time, but those feelings are illogical and unrealistic. Being grateful is good, but it isn't natural—it's learned, and it's work. It's also taken me years to get to this point of acceptance, and I still haven't perfected it yet. To anyone who enjoys driving and, for whatever reason, finds it more difficult now than ever before, my heart goes out to you. So too if you know exactly the treatment you need and can't afford it. There are plenty of people suffering from the same condition I am, but it's still not terribly well researched, and 'many clinicians are unfamiliar with [its] existence,' let alone how to manage it, per The Scientific Journal of The Royal College of Ophthalmologists . Also, it should go without saying that none of this is medical advice; I encourage you to see a doctor if you have similar concerns. What you've just read is something I've wanted to write for a long time. Whenever I tried, I'd get stuck on what purpose it'd serve. Frankly, I'm still not sure, but it's always cathartic to vent. And if it gets even a few more people talking about things like this—hell, if it gets more attention on how scorchingly bright today's headlights are—I'll take it. We could all use some relief. Have your own story about struggling with night driving? Comment below or contact the author directly: Adam Ismail is the News Editor at The Drive, coordinating the site's slate of daily stories as well as reporting his own and contributing the occasional car or racing game review. He lives in the suburbs outside Philly, where there's ample road for his hot hatch to stretch its legs, and ample space in his condo for his dusty retro game consoles.
