Add explicit notification of unsaved comments/highlights if sidebar is folded

[almereyda]

I am switching between a high number of user agents to browse the web. Some of them equipped with the extension, others with a bookmarklet or, in browsers of other users or private tabs, via via.

It happens to me I am using Hypothes.is intuitively as a bookmarking engine by highlighting pages' titles or meaningful excerpts.

Now I was confronted with a situation where I wasn't logged in on a client and only saw it in a late tab my annotations wouldn't have been stored without logging in. Doing so saved my highlights on the page where I logged in.

But reloading Hypothesis, by turning it off and on again, in the other tabs led to the loss of my initial highlights. Logging in in every frame with retyping the password every time is not an option. Reloading the iframe didn't help, either. Fortunately only in few tabs with articles whose headlines were highlighted only.

If Hypothesis would have told me from the very beginning my highlights are only ephemeral, I would have chosen to log in immediately.

We can derive further ideas from this report:

• Save anonymous annotations to localStorage (so they don't get lost upon reinitialization of Hypothesis - pattern known from federated wiki)
• In case of multiple anonymous Hypothesis iframes, reload them upon log in in any (so they recognize the new authentication state across iframes > tab-independent web workers?)

[judell]

Very useful feedback, thank you. We have explored accepting and caching annotations before login, and would like to support that.