When building desktop applications in Python, I often found myself rewriting the same GUI patterns — layouts, button bindings, navigation and state handling.
To simplify that workflow, I started building a small visual tool using CustomTkinter.
That experiment evolved into a structured desktop app builder.
**
Core Design
**
Instead of generating static templates, I designed the system around three components:
• A visual widget system
• A logic rules engine
• A JSON-based state model
**
Logic Rules Engine
**
Each widget can define actions such as:
Updating another widget
Modifying a variable
Conditional execution (if / else)
Navigating between pages
Rules are stored as structured data and interpreted at runtime.
This abstraction allows building interactive applications without manually wiring callbacks.
**
JSON State Model
**
Projects are serialized into JSON including:
Pages
Widgets
Properties
Variables
Logic rules
Designing the state model turned out to be more complex than building the UI itself.
**
Export Strategy
**
The builder separates the design environment from the generated runtime application.
A packaging pipeline allows creating runnable applications, including standalone builds.
Managing dependency isolation and environment independence was one of the most challenging parts.
**
What I Learned
**
State management defines long-term flexibility
Logic abstraction is harder than UI design
GUI builders quickly grow architecturally complex
The project is still evolving, and I’m open to technical feedback.
GitHub (demo & documentation):
https://github.com/talhababi/VisualTK-Studio
Top comments (0)