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Why Choose Digitalfire INSIGHT?

INSIGHT is About Understanding Glazes

INSIGHT is intended for classic ceramic chemistry calculations. It reflects our philosophy that a good glaze is much more than looks, it fits the body and does not craze, shiver, pinhole, blister, crawl, scratch, mark or leach. It is better to develop, understand, control and adjust a few base recipes than be 'held hostage' by scores of 'traveling' recipes that don't work or by consultants and suppliers who are not there when you need them.

INSIGHT is for people who are ready for ceramic chemistry, who want answers and are asking "Why?".

INSIGHT is About Understanding Materials

INSIGHT works closely with the Digitalfire Reference Library (also ceramic-materials.com). INSIGHT users get preferred access to unsurpassed information about ceramic oxides, materials, processes, trouble shooting, properties, tests, hazards, companies and hundreds of technical articles. This is the internet's number one practical traditional ceramics technical information resource and it just keeps growing.

Side-by-Side Recipe Support

The biggest single advantage of INSIGHT is its independent fully functional side-by-side two-recipe support. It is built from the ground up to facilitate comparison of two recipes and their formulas. This makes the base-recipe-with-adjustments approach to formulation and the chemistry-changes-to-flawed-recipe approaches to troubleshooting very practical. You can combine the two recipe, swap them, use one as a target toward which to move another, do material substitution with greater ease, even compare the same recipe or material using different unity and LOI settings.

INSIGHT is Available in Multiple Languages

INSIGHT can run in other languages like Spanish, German, Dutch. Language modules can be downloaded from our website.

INSIGHT is Perfect for Education, it is the Standard

Discounts are available for schools with ceramic programs and their students, these discounts also apply to site licenses (thus a site license costs only 2.5 times the cost of one INSIGHT program).
It is used and taught world-wide and taught in universities and companies. It is the standard.
The INSIGHT manual (in Adobe Reader format) has a lessons section that is perfect for step-by-step teaching of the mechanics of using the software and the power of ceramic calculations and how to solve a variety of glaze problems.
We have a comprehensive collection of training videos (the lessons in the manual also have matching videos). These can be watched on our website or downloaded.
INSIGHT is designed so that the concepts of unity, analysis, formula, mole%, target and unity formula, and LOI are easily demonstrated.
INSIGHT links to the Digitalfire Reference Library website creating an ideal research tool for students. This website is the best ceramic materials reference site in the world and provides practical ceramic material and much other related information.
Our support material ebooks, website, and program help deal with ceramic problems in a down-to-earth way that consider physics, mineralogy and chemistry.
INSIGHT is closely linked with our book "The Magic of Fire", the two are great companions. Magic of Fire is required reading at many university programs.
Through its ties with Digitalfire Reference Library INSIGHT supports for the definition of physical tests and maintenance of test result data make it an all around tool to understand and weigh the relative significance of both the chemistry and physics of your ceramic materials and compounds.
Since INSIGHT is an international standard you can share your recipe files with other via email.

INSIGHT Features

INSIGHT is focused on classic ceramic calculations.
INSIGHT considers oxides as if they were available as powdered materials. That means you can enter a material analysis as a recipe. Although not at first obvious, this ability gives INSIGHT amazing flexibility in ways that become increasingly obvious with experience.
INSIGHT's has a unique approach to formula to batch calculations: You simply specify an amount of material by the amount of an oxide you need from it rather than by weight. Thus formula-to-batch calculations are very much like batch-to-formula.
INSIGHT puts a lot of emphasis on speed and small program size. It keeps material and oxide data in memory so that calculations are lightning-fast (it can calculate both recipes many times in one second).
INSIGHT provides tools so you can customize its database of oxides and materials. However it goes much further, the program talks to our Digitalfire Reference Library database to keep you up-to-date and it provides an override system so that you can customize things like material cost and oxide thermal expansion so that these survive material database updates from the web site.
INSIGHT supports both Database mode and File System mode for recipe storage. Files are written in XML format. The SQLite database engine is used.
INSIGHT automatically backs up recipes, you can erase its recipe database and it will be rebuilt automatically.
INSIGHT normally stores material data in XML text files but it can also write and read CSV Excel worksheet files and take you directly into Excel at any time to edit and manipulate the data. This offers unsurpassed flexibility in maintaining your materials database.
INSIGHT supports attaching up to 9 pictures to each recipe and these are stored safely as files linked-by-name to the parent recipe.
INSIGHT runs on Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP/Vista and on Macintosh 0S8/9, OSX and Linux. It is identical on every platform and each can use data from the others. One serial number is good for all.
INSIGHT has a template driven report system that can generate HTML reports with links to material and oxide information.
INSIGHT provides a large library of process, material, oxide and property research materials.

INSIGHT is Supported

We successfully compete with free and very low priced products. How? Service and commitment. It takes a lot more than a computer program to get control of your glazes. Our customer support is second-to-none, there are dozens of testimonials on our website from customers happy with our service.

INSIGHT has been around since 1980, the current version can still read and write the original recipe file format.
Our extensive web sites (thousands of pages) keep you up-to-date, INSIGHT is designed to work together with the Digitalfire Reference Library website.
New versions of INSIGHT can be downloaded (usually free) at any time. Demonstration versions can be downloaded by anyone.
We update and improve INSIGHT often, usually every month
We travel extensively visiting companies and customers and we have a good understanding of ceramic industry.
We conduct seminars and administer their content on our website.
We are free with information, our website is very large and it is free to everyone and we put our best into it.
Email help is available 7 days a week. We correspond extensively with students all over the world who seek out our site to get help with assignments.
New versions and fixes of the software are posted regularly on our site.
We produce a complementary 'industrial-strength' SQL database product named 4SIGHT Server for documenting physical testing and accumulating, searching, studying, and reporting the results.
We publish an electronic newsletter on ceramic chemistry and physics that anyone can register for.

Ceramic Software is Our Only Business

Digitalfire Corporation has been developing and marketing INSIGHT worldwide to manufacturing, education, professional, and hobby users for since 1980. We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing our concepts. Ceramic related software is our only business. INSIGHT was already well established when the IBM-PC was first introduced.

We Know Ceramics

INSIGHT's main developer, Tony Hansen, has 35+ years of technical experience in manufacturing, material mining and processing, glaze and body formulation and adjustment, process problem solving, lab testing and quality control, and consulting with thousands of industrial, educational and private clients with all array ceramic problems and challenges.

We Know Computers

We wrote the first commercial ceramic chemistry software for the Radio Shack Model 1 back in 1979 and have adapted it to 6 operating systems and 9 development languages since then. We have expertise in relational database systems for workstations and web servers; desktop, electronic, graphics and database publishing; web back and front end and design; medium and high level languages for workstation, server and client; computer and telecommunications hardware and networking; palm computer programming and interfacing; and many other types of software and hardware development tools.

We Know the Internet

At Digitalfire we know how to configure and run powerful web and application servers and make state-of-the-art websites (we can make ebay or amazon type sites). The future of computing is on the internet and INSIGHT will migrate in its ability to talk to the net and eventually actually running on the internet. We wrote, own and operate cutting edge ecommerce, search engine and database servers and have done so since the birth of the public internet in the mid 90s. We understand internet security and have built a knowledge that we will use to find new ways to make ceramic materials, physics, and chemistry information freely available.

We Have Connections and Information

Since 1996 we have been using the Internet to accumulate a database of ceramic related companies and individuals around the world along with their interests, expertises and relationships related to ceramic technology (not marketing). We believe that no one in the world has more contacts at all levels than we do. Our http://digitalfire.com site does much of this automatically now (e.g. people can update their profiles themselves). This database is second-to-none, we do not share it (unless contributors agree otherwise).

For more background historical and technical information please see the beginning pages of the INSIGHT manual, you can download it for free on the download page of http://digitalfire.com.

INSIGHT home page


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