The Adobe team seems to have really heard out the developer community this season. In the midst of the Apple vs. Adobe war, a phoenix seems to have risen from the ashes. Enter Flash 10.1 on Mac OS X. After years of poor performance and the long raging Apple and Adobe battle, hardware acceleration for Adobe Flash finally got the green signal.

With the 10.1 release Adobe has aimed to correct several of the previous Flash glitches. Adobe says users can look forward to no more bogging down of browsers, CPU utilization reduction (up to two-thirds when GPU hardware acceleration is active) and eliminating the iPhone it runs on a gamut of handheld devices.

The latest Flash Player version for Mac supports GPU decoding of H.264-encoded video. But the hiccup is only some Macs are supported. The feature requires Mac OS X 10.6.3 Snow Leopard and a Mac with a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M GPU.

To be more precise below is another variation to make it easier:

• MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008
• MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009
• Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009
• iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009

The update 10.1.82.76 was announced by Adobe product manager Thibault Imbert on his blog. Code-named “Gala,” this feature was announced several months earlier and in a break from usual protocol, Adobe enabled the new feature in a security release.

Flash Player 10.1 has improved performance, power management and video features, new multi-touch and private browsing capabilities and provides a better Flash Player experience for Mac users. Paul Betlam, Sr. Director, Engineering at Adobe Systems further elaborates on the features. “Our Mac engineers, with some help from the Safari team, made significant changes to Flash Player for Macs. One improvement we made is the use of a double-buffered OpenGL context for improved full screen playback efficiency. We also investigated a number of compile-time optimizations using Xcode to improve our overall execution speed of Flash Player on Macs. Rendering performance was improved by our use of Core Animation. For Macs running OS X 10.6 or greater, we leverage the hardware acceleration in Core Animation to dramatically improve the efficiency of displaying web pages which combine both SWF and HTML content.”

To heighten its appeal, Mac users can also benefit from additional noteworthy trimmings. Flash Player 10.1 takes advantage of the latest hardware and operating system user interaction capabilities. Therefore a new set of ActionScript 3 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events such as pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap can be employed.

Adobe’s generosity further extends itself. After confirming the availability of Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X, Adobe has also said that Flash Player 10.1 is on its way to Android devices, and Adobe AIR 2 runtime is now available for developers wanting to deploy applications built for AIR 2 on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

“For the record, we loved the earlier Adobe Flash 10.1 beta: it’s a huge leap forward for Flash performance on Macs, specifically when it comes to streaming high-definition video. If you’re rocking one of the supported Macs listed above, you should install the latest Flash update now,” concludes John Brownlee in the Cult of Mac.