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 have been working with clay for 3 decades and this is the first time I feel that I have really begun to get a grip on what glaze materials do. It's one thing to read about the materials in a book but theory and reality often didn't line up for me. The best part was learning as much as we did by limiting our base glaze. So thanks for your book, Insight and Five Twenties!"
"This is an amazing piece of work you have done-so comprehensive and vast-it is overwhelming. Greatest of compliments to you. You are making me use brain cells that I have not used for 30 years when I was in pre-med and then industrial design school."
"Have just spent a couple of weeks intensively exploring Insight and stacks to go yet. Congratulations! It keeps surprising me with the attention to possibilities, and forethought. In about 1993 I developed a system on paper to convert glaze formulae to and from analyses and Unity formulae, a completely circular system. It worked but very, very slow. My son is a long term sufferer of my rabbiting on about and therefore gaining understanding of ceramic technology. He is a BSc student and also programmer dealing in intricate database development interfacing with industry specific software. He is very impressed. Thank you for your contribution to this exciting ceramic world. "
"It looks TERRIFIC!"
"I solved a shivering problem with a low expansion/high expansion frit system as recommended at Digitalfire so I bought INSIGHT."
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