Blender Foundation's development

Blender 2.4-2.6

I have been a user of blender of a little over 5 years now. I was 1^st introduced to it by my teacher in High School. Back then blender was in 2.3 and all I could make appear was the “Suzanne” monkey head. Like many people have said blender 2.3’s user interface was not user friendly and with the users limited knowledge about shortcuts or tabs (as every function had a shortcut that was unknown). And to make things that bit more annoying, the tabs can be moved around but never saved.

In 2.4 some iprovements were made as well as the introductory to it’s in build node editor/composter. More information was released on shortcuts and “how to” but sadly the interface was still annoying but a little more friendly. And I stopped using blender for a long time because I didn’t have a clue what to do with it.

Years later when I was attending Leeds Tomas Danby I started to talk to one of the tutors about blender, and he told me about their open sours movies, something I had no idea about. After watching them and seeing the new interface I decided to try it out again. Blender 2.5 introduced many new feathers and a massive upgrade to its game engine and user interface, as well as splash screen previews of it 3^rd movie  but in this update a usefull feather was removed “knife tool”

We are now into 2.6X nothing much has changed, its user face is the same, but a lot of addons were added,

• New animation system, which allows almost any value to be animated
• Ray tracing optimizations, rendering some scenes "up to 10x faster"
• Ocean simulation
• Cycles render engine
• 3D audio and video
• Game engine navigation meshes
• Motion capture tools
• Camera tracking

But introduction of BMesh which allows for n sided polygons (ngons), as opposed to the previous limit of 4. 

http://www.blender.org/