Mac OS X Lion’s multi-touch gesture feature lets you perform numerous tasks without moving your mouse pointer across the screen. If you want to further extend the Mac gesture based controls to handle those applications which aren’t supported and perform application specific actions via custom mouse gestures, SwitftRing is a solid pick. SwiftRing is a unique mouse gesture app that doesn’t require drawing mouse gestures to perform specified actions, unlike Gest, Just Gestures, and StrokeIt. So how does it work? You press option key, a ring appears with actions mapped with four directions. Moving mouse pointer to any direction will let you create a gesture based control.

SwiftRing is a profile-based mouse gesture application. You can define mouse gestures for different actions inside applications. Just press option key to bring up its circular interface in order to choose the action which you want to perform. For instance, you may see Refresh, Mark all as read, Star Item with Mac Mail app, whereas it shows simple navigation controls along with open new tab and new window for Safari and other browsers.

SwiftRing operates from the system menu bar. Right-click it to disable SwitfRing and open Preferences to change default settings and configure gestures for different applications.

In Preferences, you can change the pop-up menu trigger key and delay, add new apps with custom commands, change Ring Settings for default applications, and change rings commands for different applications. If you add QuickTime to the list, you might want to replace the default commands with custom ones. All you need is to select QuickTime from the list, select the gesture you want to change, click Record Key Sequence to replace the default command with required command.

By Default, it creates circle with 4 segments, however, you can add up to 6 segments for an application from Ring Settings section. If you, for instance, choose 6 segments, it lets you add commands for 6 different functions for an application in question.

After you’ve done configuring gestures, close the preferences. Now use these gestures on newly added applications.  When circle appears on the application, you won’t have to click the associated action. Just move the mouse pointer towards the direction of the required action to perform it.

SwiftRing is in beta testing phase, which means you may encounter some functionality related issues. During testing on Mac OS X 10.7, we experienced some problems while using the gestures. It works on Mac OS X 10.6 and higher.