• Fluid is a 2-year-old application for creating Site-Specific Browsers (or SSBs). It consists of Fluid.app (the SSB creator) and a WebKit-based browser which is the template for any SSB you create with Fluid. Until recently, Fluid was entirely closed-source (more on that in a sec).
• Cruz is a one-year-old general-purpose web browser based the same code as Fluid SSBs. Until recently, it was also entirely closed source.
• Fluidium is:
  1. An open source (Apache License) WebKit-based browser hosted oh GitHub.
  2. The name I’ve chosen for an Adobe Air-like product based on the Fluidium source code. Basically, a developer platform for creating Rich Internet Applications for Mac OS X only. This product is in the very early stages.

If you are a developer, and you want to create and redistribute an SSB for your web app, please start with the Fluidium source code on GitHub, not with Fluid downloaded from http://fluidapp.com. It’s the same, only better. Trust me.

The Fluidium source code on GitHub is basically the original code behind Fluid SSBs and Cruz. However, I did a significant rewrite of several parts of that code base starting in November. The result is the Fluidium source code now found on GitHub.

A few things to note:

1. I haven’t yet released a new version of Fluid based on the new Fluidium source code. I’ll do that eventually. But first, I’ll probably do a much smaller Fluid maintenance release based on the old (pre-November) Fluid code, just to get some important bug fixes out the door.
2. A new version of Cruz based on the Fluidium source code is coming soon.
3. The “SSB Creator” part of Fluid (basically, Fluid.app) is still closed-source and will probably remain that way. I don’t see much value in open sourcing this, honestly.

Bottom line: The Fluidium source code on GitHub will be the foundation of three products (Fluid, Cruz, Fluidium).

Clear as mud, right?