The PDF Manual.
Modified: November 21, 2021
Download it from the Files panel in your Insight-live.com account or from the home page at https://digitalfire.com (current downloads only include the program file, manual, starter recipe, materials - overrides data is built in).
We moved functionality to a private account at Insight-Live.com - because people now expect to get at their data from any device anywhere. And for our survival. Ceramic lab work is much bigger than glaze chemistry, it is a physical world where testing, observation, record-keeping are vital. Insight-Live is about maintaining that data. Its recipes share pictures, they have firing schedules, notes, development history, testing data, links, they belong to projects. And they accumulate into the thousands and are easy to find and compare.
Desktop Insight, by default, opens and saves recipes to its INSIGHTDATA.DB recipe database file (that file is in your documents/insight folder, it can be uploaded and imported into Insight-live). If Desktop Insight does not find the INSIGHTDATA.DB file on startup, it imports, into its database, all the recipe files (e.g. RCP, RCX) it finds in your documents/insight/recipe folder (it does not erase the original files, but no longer uses them). From then on, when you choose File -> Open (not File -> Open File System) you open recipes from its database (using the Recipe Database Window). When you Save you save to the database. See page 94 of the manual for more information.
Because you have to be able to compare ten recipes side-by-side. For physics as well as chemistry. And people need to be able to find thousands on any device from anywhere.
Insight FAQ
There is a direct relationship between the way ceramic glazes fire and their chemistry. Insight is a calculation tool anyone can use to learn and harness the power of glaze chemistry.
Without glaze chemistry you'll never really have control and you could be a slave to your suppliers or the trafficing in recipes that never work.
Overwhelmed by glaze chemistry? Try starting here.
"This is a really good software and must be very useful to me. I come from a manufacturer of glazed wall tile in China."
"I'd like to congratulate you on what looks to be a fantastic piece of software. I've been using the raw materials section of your website for almost a year - working part time in a pottery supplies store it has been an invaluable resource ... I'm very excited at what I've learned about it over the past couple of days. I'm actually looking to produce a range of commercial glazes and I feel your software would be an essential part of my developmental/testing process."
"Have just spent a couple of weeks intensively exploring Insight and stacks to go yet. Congratulations! It keeps surprising me with the attention to possibilities, and forethought. In about 1993 I developed a system on paper to convert glaze formulae to and from analyses and Unity formulae, a completely circular system. It worked but very, very slow. My son is a long term sufferer of my rabbiting on about and therefore gaining understanding of ceramic technology. He is a BSc student and also programmer dealing in intricate database development interfacing with industry specific software. He is very impressed. Thank you for your contribution to this exciting ceramic world. "
"First of all I have purchased Insight and it works great, thanks. I would like a cd of the (online) tutorials."
"The software is very good, but in China all of the raw materials are different to whats available in the USA and Canada ... But that doesn’t mean that I may not be interested in insight at some later stage as I was very impressed with the product. "
"What you have provided is a fabulous way for people to make glaze technology accessible and understandable. Though I still know how to do everything by hand, Insight has certainly enabled me to get things done quickly and broaden my diagnostic abilities. Thank you for making all of this available to the ceramic community. "