Flash Player 'Gala' supported by Mac OS X 10.6.3

Despite all of their past tiffs, Adobe and Apple still somehow manage to find ways to make their respective technologies compatible. No, this isn't about the iPad, but rather the most recent version of Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6.3.

Following Apple's move to open the doors to low-level access to some additional NVIDIA GeForce GPUs (9400M, 320M and GT 330M), Adobe has unveiled a preview release of Flash Player, with the sophisticated code name, "Gala." Specifically, this introduces support for H.264 video hardware decoding on computers running Mac OS X 10.6.3.

Adobe insists that 75% of videos streamed online "worldwide are delivered using Flash technology." It seems like they want their global presence (importance?) to be known and want Apple to drop the whole "HTML5 only and forever" act. While it is nice to see some additional Apple/Adobe compatibility, it's unlikely this will go a lot farther, and especially not on the iPhone nor the iPad.