The Blender Foundation writes:

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.57. This is the first stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work.

We name this version “Stable” not only because it’s mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.

The next 2 months we will keep working on finishing a couple of left-over 2.5 targets and we expect to get feedback and bug reports from users to handle as well. If all goes well, the 2.58 version then can be the final release of the 2.5 series, with a massive amount of new projects to be added for an exciting cycle of 2.6x versions. Target is to release updates every 2 months this year.

http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

Hi artists!

With the risk of getting a flood here; here’s another little contest. For the 2.57 release I’d also like to see a new header for the blender.org site. Is about time!

Here’s the empty png to play with.

This is unrelated to making a new blender.org design in general, that project has to be started yet. Too busy with Blender itself still after 2.57 there’s more time I hope.

Just post cool variations here. Header will be used when 2.57 gets out too. Reward: eternal gratitude + free pick in the blender.org e-store!

-Ton

And here is phime studio submission to the contest on the blender artists forum
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?212587-blender.org-header-update/page4

 

Hi all,

We’re now publishing release candidates for the first official non-beta 2.5 version:
http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.57/

Reports on issues can be discussed in IRC – irc.freenode.net #blendercoders – or by posting a report in the bug tracker.

Thanks!
-Ton-

Stay tuned for new updates on They Ate My Clapper …