My expectations were not very high for Deskmate 3. Deskmate 2 was nothing but a colorful version of DOS Shell in my honest opinion.
Again, I wasn’t able to use a mouse, but the support was definitely there. The programs were better, and it was arranged much better.

It still runs on top of MS/PC-DOS.

One thing to note, however, and not necessarily a problem with Deskmate so much as a problem with the emulator. When I tried running Deskmate 3 on Virtualbox, it would display in Chinese and fail to work entirely. I had to run it in VMWare, which was a pain in my ass, but whatever, right?

This is Deskmate 3’s desktop. Obviously Tandy took their time in developing DM3. There is some form of graphics support. There are even a few sample files included.
Those boxes, or “menus” as Tandy called them, could be hidden, shown, moved, removed, added, or customized. Here you see a couple of “quick load” menus, a calculator and a calendar. Much more could be added.
The text-based origin of Deskmate is apparent, however, as soon as you start customizing the layout. Most of the applications use the same font, which appears to be the BIOS font, everything aligns to a grid, drag and drop is non-existant, and what little graphics support it does have is, well, little. As a result, Deskmate feels clunky and is often not very user-friendly.

MacOS 1 came with a slide puzzle. Well, in Deskmate 3, the entire desktop is the slide puzzle. Things can be moved around, added or removed using the Desktop menu, but none can overlap, trying to do so results in a “Will not fit” error message.

Deskmate 3 includes this handy setup program, which allows you to set the date and time, colors, and configure communications, printers, and the mouse if you have one.

Deskmate 3 also includes this tree view in addition to the menu view. Both can be accessed using the View menu, or pressing F5 on the keyboard. Tree view displays a list of the drives, as well as a directory and file listing so you can easily view the files.

Telecom is Deskmate 3’s bundled application for use with connecting to electronic bulletin boards, news services, or mainframe computers.
This dialog is a good example of the common controls used throughout Deskmate 3.