Why flash will not support mac's mouse wheel is still not clear, but there are fixes out there. We chose to go with spark's solution because of its adoption into the gaia framework. Unfortunately there is not much documentation to be found, and the instructions are only three simple steps, which is one too few. Here's what was missing:
activating the javascript from the html...
This is the one line of code that should be placed in the html and is not mentioned:
/*< script type="text/javascript" src="js/swfwheel.js">< /script >*/
(minus the extra spaces I inserted so the code would show in my blog...)
All that I needed was this added to the html, and voila.
From now on, even if it is not in the documentation... I will check to see if the javascript is being activated by the html.