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.
"This is a really lovely program and all of my concerns have been dealt with. Please ignore any comments I have previously left."
"I have had excellent results lowering the expansion in the existing glaze formulas enabling me to use a much stronger clay body and eliminating the fracturing after the glaze fire. We now get a 100% yield compared to the 75% to 80% yield from the beginning of the company almost 20 years ago."
"The program really is changing the way I think about glazes."
"It and has opened up my way of thinking about glazes ... it has made me feel free to try many more things than I would have, as well as enhanced my understanding of how to get what I want. Many thanks, Tony!!!"
"I'm a painter/photographer so this really chemical approach is very new. Working on a Mac I found your program pretty soon. Of course your aware xxx also works on a Mac. First I'd like to compare both programs; that will take some time as I still don't understand all the technical possibilities. Two months later: Doesn't matter, I would like to buy the program, and of course also the level 2, that's a fantastic asset."
"I am very pleased to read that you are actively working on the Linux versions of Insight, it is always wonderful when software is offered across Windows, Mac and Linux platforms."