Fix shift key constrain problem in Adobe Illustrator
It's amazing how reliant I've become on key strokes, especially when it comes to graphics editing. A few months back I noticed that holding down the shift key in Adobe Illustrator no longer constrained items to 45, 90, or 180 when moving and that spacebar + command didn't bring up the magnify option. My initial search yielded nothing, probably because my brain was mush and incapable of putting together logical search phrases. I haven't needed to do much work in Illustrator until recently so I tried the search again and low and behold, a solution!
Chances are that if you're having this problem you are Quicken user like me. It turns out that Quicken's One-Step feature launches a helper application that runs in the background. I had enabled this and hadn't though anything of it, but as it turns out, it causes conflicts with Illustrator's keystroke options.
To fix
- Open Quicken
- Click on the One-Step button in the tool bar or select Online->One Step Update...
- Click the Scheduled Updates tab
- Uncheck each and every item
- Quit Quicken and restart your Mac
That should do it. Happy vector art creation!