The friendly folks from Drupal consultancy Lullabot posted a nice video of installing a local server on Mac OS X here.
This is a nice addition to the installation How-To I wrote for the Windows platform. Please think about changing the Inno-DB settings (step 3) and installing PP (step 4).
You will find the XAMPP installation instructions at http://www.projectpier.org/node/224.
Sometimes you will try some new things, modify some themes or translate ProjectPier into your language. This can be very slow or means a lot of FTP’ing to your hosted web space. An easier way to do this is to run ProjectPier on a local server on your computer.