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.
"I will be formulating glasses to match a 104 COE. Thanks so much for your help, I am looking forward to using the program successfully to get the glass I am looking for. One real nice benefit for me is that you have frit compositions for my calculations as bases I will use - this alone is worth the price."
"First impressions of the software on my Macintosh are very good and the manual is excellent. When I'm not acting the part-time ceramicist, I'm a web software designer/developer and I know how hard it is to do this stuff well."
"All I have to say is "Bless You!" I am a beginning potter (just 2 1/2 years of community ed) and glazes are a complete mystery to me. The professional potters I have come to know use the "hit & miss" method of glaze formulation, and the community college I attend hasn't the funding or space to educate re: glazes! In my previous life (before marriage & children) I was a chemistry major. The lack of science used by local potters has had me completely baffled--no one has ever cared to find out WHY their glazes were performing poorly!!!"
"Tony, thanks for a great programme."
"Highly recommended by __. "
"Some of the glazes I've tried (from other recipe books) have worked while others have not. Kind of feels like flying an airplane without knowing what the controls do. I understand how to weigh and mix and am just learning about the different materials. To gain more information, I started researching glazes and how they work on the internet and came across your site. I want to be in control of the 'flying plane' as it were. So far I've had a few successful 'flights' but it was mostly luck. If I'm going to have a unique voice in my surface treatment, I'm going to need to know what to adjust to get the desired results. "