Last week, Jason wrote up his new podcast note workflow, using Keyboard Maestro and an AppleScript script. The end goal was to create a text file that contained notes about things to fix while editing, along with timecodes to ease the process of finding them.

It’s a clever idea but I found myself wondering whether or not the same thing could be accomplished in a shortcut.

The answer? Yes! Shortcuts on the Mac is actually a pretty ideal way to handle most of this process, because it’s good at dealing with files. My first crack at a shortcut was just eight steps long—not bad!

That said, there was a bit of a cheat in that initial version that used a few lines of Python, including the very useful strftime function, to handle the heavy lifting of converting a time in seconds to a timecode.

But, as Jason rightly pointed out when I shared the shortcut with him, requiring the Mac in question to have Python installed could be tricky in the future, given that Apple seems to be deprecating its default installation of Python, among other scripting languages. While a third-party app might have been able to handle the conversion just as simply, the goal was to implement it entirely in what any Mac user would have.…