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 did use local materials available in my country, Czech republic, Europe. I did recalculate few of the recipes with the help of the Insight. I am really excited about the possibility to make almost the same looking glaze with different materials!"
"I'd like to congratulate you on what looks to be a fantastic piece of software. I've been using the raw materials section of your website for almost a year - working part time in a pottery supplies store it has been an invaluable resource ... I'm very excited at what I've learned about it over the past couple of days. I'm actually looking to produce a range of commercial glazes and I feel your software would be an essential part of my developmental/testing process."
"I teach Pottery 1 and 2 at a high school. I have not used your program enough to understand all the intricasies but thus far it has shown to be very useful in computing glaze formula changes."
"I make all my own glazes from scratch but with the only education I have being that derived from books I am pretty much in the dark. Lucky mistakes have helped me come up with some great glazes but really, what is happening remains a mystery. I need to learn much more and am hoping your software will help with that."
"I had your program 15 years ago and it helped me so much with cone 10R glazes. I am back to clay again and looking forward to working on cone 6 electric. Thanks for your great work."
"On the clay side of things - I used Insight to calibrate a glaze substituting Strontium for Barium. Worked out great! Could not have done it without looking at the chemistry. Would have ended up an oxide imbalance if had just done a 1 for 1 replacement."