The PDF Manual.
Modified: November 20, 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.
"The download and install went perfect which I enjoyed ;-) . I find it very expensive to keep buying all the various components of the recipes. It would be nice to actually understand what the ingredients do and learn how to substitute a smaller subset of ingredients for the desired results. Hence the interest in your product! There is a lot to learn and it looks like the software coupled with the Magic of Fire book would be a structured path to meet this goal."
"I've run hundreds of glaze tests without the aid of software and while I haven't done badly I'm definitely finished with that approach. After modifying a couple of Pete Pinnell's Tomato Red glazes with different materials side-by-side in both INISGHT and xx, the logic of how you've designed your program really impressed me."
"I formulate clays and glazes for a clay manufacturer ... Insight has been a valuable asset to our formulation process and the testing procedures you recommend have been of great use to us over the years as well. "
"I am currently finishing my schooling, and will begin teaching in the fall. This program will be invaluable to me once I start teaching. Thank you for all the hard work you have done in putting all this information in one easy to use program. My instructors are of the "happy accident" school of glazing. They have done this for so many years that they are constantly tweaking the glazes and mixing new ones, most of which don't give consistent results. I think this program will be a Godsend to my further education in ceramics. "
"I got my first computer because of INSIGHT. It has changed my life after 30 years in ceramics and teaching."
"Despite my having told them about Insight, they still mix up large batches of "baby-poop" glazes that craze."