As a designer/graphic artist, I began drawing communication symbols for my daughter Meta in 2000. Meta became the namesake of the later published METACOM symbols. Together with Meta, the symbol collection has since 'grown up' - both in terms of the number of symbols and the topics considered.
Since 2004, the METACOM symbols have been offered for installation on computers to create and print AAC materials. In 2015, the symbol collection was complemented by the companion MetaSearch program, which initially offered only a keyword search. In early 2018, additional MetaSearch features were added: functions for customizing symbols, integrated templates for printing picture cards, and the Writing with Symbols function.
At the end of 2022, MetaSearch's functionality was greatly expanded once again. New additions include the ability to flexibly create, save, and print documents with different layouts in MetaSearch. The number of available symbols has increased from 10000 to 17000. New in this version is also the name addition "Desktop". The offer is now called METACOM 9 Desktop. The name addition became necessary to avoid confusion with other offers, because the METACOM symbols have now also been integrated into various apps from different publishers.
METACOM 1 (CD), 450 symbols, appeared in 2004
METACOM 2 (CD), 850 symbols, published 2005
METACOM 3 (CD), 1400 symbols, published 2007
METACOM 4 (CD), 2000 symbols, released in 2009
METACOM 5 (CD), 3800 symbols, released 2011
METACOM 6 (DVD), 6300 symbols, released 2013
METACOM 7 (DVD), 8000 symbols, MetaSearch with search function, released 2015
METACOM 8 (DVD, download), 10000 symbols, MetaSearch with search and edit functions, released early 2018
METACOM 9 Desktop (download, optional additional DVD), 17000 symbols, MetaSearch with strongly extended search and editing functions, released end of 2022