The Blender world is progressing.  Not much new in this release.  The only difference is they reworked the API so some scripts will need to be changed.  Also,  the coders have fixed some 200 bugs.  Talk about dedication.  Listen to their users and fixing what counts.  There are still more, but they will be working on those as well.  The only negative is that the .obj exporter is broken.  I don't know how hard it is, but I guess they couldn't fix.  Anyways check it out and head on over to Blender.org for the beta release.