Conquer the Glaze Dragon With INSIGHT Glaze Chemistry Software
The PDF Manual.
Modified: November 20, 2021

Desktop Insight is now free!

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).

Desktop Insight is legacy, we had to move on-line

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.

Importing Desktop Insight recipes into your Insight-Live.com account

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.

Why is Insight-Live so much different to use than Desktop Insight?

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.

Desktop Insight focusses solely on glaze chemistry

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.

What People Have Said

"I have used INSIGHT for years and am incredibly grateful for all the help you and INSIGHT have given me."

"I have to tell you that this program is really really fabulous! I thank you very much for putting it together and making it available. I had set up a little Excel program to figure the flux unity and Si:Al stuff, but it was cumbersome and lacked all the wonderful data you have put into INSIGHT."

"The programme is great! It has saved us time and anguish on many an occasion."

"Am very very happy to have seen your website and found out the great information your c.d rom would provide to me and my small scale industry ... because I wish to kill the glaze dragon and stay in control. Commercial glaze is so costly here and am not really making so much profit from my ceramic sales because of high cost of the commercial glazes and my inability to have a good glaze made by myself."

"I mostly work with crystalline glazes. All the European potters speak in terms of Seger formulas so I have to become proficient with the program if I am to communicate with them."

"I am firing a downdraft propane kiln to cone 10. I have been using the Digitalfire software to better understand the glazes I know and see their similarities/differences. I enjoy glaze chemistry but I am tired of testing blindly and floundering around with countless buckets of glazes that don't really satisfy. I want to test smarter."


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