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Best way to show results with a list of options

I am trying to make a "Oregon Trail" like game with JAVA for my Computer Science class. It's all going well so far, but I would like some suggestions on ways of doing the following:
The words at the bottom "Health", "Stats", etc are buttons. I was wondering what the best way of making those buttons present information would be. Is there a way I could show them in that information in one of the bottom squares, and when a different button is clicked change the info to that one? Or would it be best to have popup frames to display the information?

IMHO, I'd go with display the content or info of the button in the panels above.
It keeps the information together in a single place and generally makes it easier to manage, no disappearing windows behind other windows for example.
You have any number of options depending on the information you want to display. You could simply use a none editable JTextArea if the information is just text, or a JList if you want to list items if the data is more structured, a JTable and even a JTree if you want to group the data into some kind of groupable hierarchy.
You could use combinations of each, based on your needs

Java GUI input text box

I'm designing a program simulating a vending machine. You know how vending machines have that one large text box that displays whatever messages you need to know...that's what I want to do. So basically, if the user clicks a button and if the item is out of store, expired, they don't have enough credit, whatever, the message should be displayed in this box.
Then, after a second or 2, return to displaying how much money the user put into the machine. I also want to make the box so that, well theres a button next to the text box to click to insert money. When they click that, I want to make the text box editable, they then enter the amount of money they want to enter, then press insert again, and the money is inserted. The text box becomes uneditable again, and displays the credit they have in the machine.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to do this?
I also was wondering how I could implement the delay before getting rid of the message and returning to displaying the credit in the machine. Thank you.

As Andrew Thompson says, you would use a JTextField. Set the desired text using the setText() method and you could then use a sleep function (usleep() I think should work for your application) and then set the text again back to the Dollar value.
Edit: didn't see the last half. To enable and disable the textfield entirely, use setEnabled(true/false), to stop it from being editable, use setEditable(true/false)
Also, just thinking, you could get the current date in a timestamp format and then enter a loop where you continually get the timestamp and compare it to the first one. If the desired difference is reached then exit the loop and update the textfield. Have a look at the Java doc for Date ;)

Accessing Default jFrame netbeans

I am trying to display an image in a jlabel, which is in the default jFrame created by Netbeans. I know how to display an image in a new Jframe, but I dont know how to acces the default Jframe since I cant customize the code and create a variable name for it. Any work arounds?
The application is supposed to display pictures from a directory, so when u press next, next image, and if you press previous the previous image will be shown. What will be the best data structure to do this efficiently so that I can keep track of the index as well?

Instead of letting the GUI designer manage your frame, let it manage the content, as suggested in this example.
Addendum: There's an example of flipping through images here.

Regarding displaying the images, you can number the images in the directory as 1,2,3...and so on. If you do this, you can use a simple counter variable (increment with the next button and decrement with the previous button ) to scan through the images. You can use this counter variable for your image name with the format.

Change color of JButton when selected, & Set mask on JFormattedTextField?

I'm writing my 1st Java program (in Netbeans) and I'm lost. I have 2 questions at the moment, if anyone is kind enough to help me.
Here's what the program is supposed to do:
take 1 of 4 "status" options, plus a 5 digit number (both of these items are entered by a user via a touch-screen monitor) and then email this info to someone with the subject line of: "Item #[5 digit number from JFormattedTextField] is currently [1 of 4 possible status options].
Email command would command after user clicks "enter" button, and then user clicks "OK" on a pop-up which asks user to confirm message about to be emailed. As far as my 3rd question, it's about the e-mailing part, and I figured that would be a another thread after I get this button & text field stuff ironed out.
Here's a picture of the touch screen UI I have so far:
(can't post images as a rookie, go to krisbunda.com/gui.png for this image)
Question #1:
the 4 status options (4 JButtons) are wrapped inside of a JPanel. I want the most recent button to have been pushed in the "statusPanel" JPanel to change the background to blue and the button text to white.
Can I put a mouselistener on the button's parent JPanel to listen for click events on the children (the 4 status JButtons), and then whichever button was last clicked, it will turn blue w/ white text? Please point me in the right direction.
Question #2:
I have a JFormattedTextField named "display" that shows the numbers as they're clicked, which are appended from a StringBuffer named "current". I want the text field to only accept a total of 5 numbers.
When I tried putting a mask of "#####" on the field, it would only chime a warning beep when I pushed the number pad's buttons. Currently I've chosen "Category: number" and "Format: custom" and then typed "#####" in the "Format:" field. This allows me to click number buttons and see their text displayed, but it doesn't stop me from typing more than 5 characters.
I'm doing this through the "Properties> FormatterFactory" dialog box. A screen shot is shown below:
(go to krisbunda.com/text-formatterFactory.png to view this image)
And here's the code I have so far:
(my post was too long with this code, so go to: krisbunda.com/java-sampleCode.txt to view)
Thanks in advance for any help!

Your code looks fine, and you already have fields set up to hold references to all your buttons, so now you just need to write the code inside the status setting buttons and then make them call a subroutine with the new status. This subroutine should then reset all the buttons to their default color and then set the special selected color on the button that corresponds to the new or existing status.
Edit: adding code here in response to your comment...
Firstly, never use == with Strings. You MUST use equals() otherwise when you get two Strings that are identical, but are different objects, they will not be the same and your comparisons will fail.
There are much better ways of coding this up, including using enums etc. but this should work for you:
// Reset all the buttons
outsideNotReadyButton.setBackground(...);
loadedButton.setBackground(...);
outsideReadyButton.setBackground(...);
shippedButton.setBackground(...);
// Now set the one of the button's colors conditionally
String status = ...
if(status.equals("SHIPPED")) {shippedButton.setBackground(Color.BLUE);}
else if(status.equals("LOADED")) {loadedButton.setBackground(Color.BLUE);}
// ...and so on

An ActionListener is the more common approach to buttons, as discussed in How to Use Buttons, etc. A FocusListener, also used in this example, is one way to change a button's appearance in the way you describe.
An sscce showing just your JFormattedTextField problem will be more helpful. Several such examples may be found in the article How to Use Formatted Text Fields.

Best way to implement refusing a value change by the user in Swing?

I have a JCheckBox that should not be checked by the user when a certain other field is empty.
So now I want to have an error popup and then reset the checkbox (I've considered disabling the checkbox, but the connection to the other field is non-obvious, and a tooltip text IMO not visible enough).
What's the correct way to do that in Swing? Through a PropertyVetoException? Where do I throw it and where do I catch it? My first (probably ugly) idea would be to add a ChangeListener that itself shows the popup and resets the value.
Edit: The question is about Nikki (screenshot below), an app I am developing which geotags images and exports them to Google Earth's KMZ format. The checkbox is used to select the images to include in the export. But this requires the images to be gotagged first (which in turn requires either a timestamp, or manual assignment). I don't think this requirement can be made obvious through the UI layout.
(source: brazzy.de)

I would simply disable the check box and add a message explaining why the option is not available. A nice way to show the message is to display a mini exclamation mark next to the check box and put the message in a tooltip.
Poping up an exception often feels wrong because users don't read error messages. For most users an error message popup means that the application did something wrong, in your case it's the normal behavior.
Edit if you insist on letting the check box enabled, another way to show the user that some info is missing would be to flash the missing data. Eg. if latitude and longitude are missing and the user clicks on export, set a red background onto these fields for a just a second. This will clearly show the user what's missing.
In this screen, don't you want to put the mouse over the red circle to understand what's going on?
validation http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipseDataBinding/images/validation10.gif

I don't think the Export JCheckBox should be disabled at all. Instead, the Export JButton itself should examine the current export list and display any anomalous entries in a way that allows navigation to a chosen photograph. If all entries are correct, Export would proceed as usual.
Addendum: It think you are right to keep the interface as non-modal as possible. My model for this would be unsaved files when exiting an editor or uncommitted changes when closing a project in an IDE.
If that's a status line at the bottom of the window, you might indicate the number of photographs currently selected for export, adding a count if any still need geocoding.

The field should simply be allowed to disable the checkbox. If the coupling is unintuitive then the GUI layout may have to be reconsidered.
EDIT: I ran it from your page, and I believe the issue here is that you actually have a third and fourth step in addition to select folder, select images. The third step is validate image, and fourth is select images for export. I think your problem is that this is not clearly conveyed in the current layout, and that reflects in your question.
I would suggest that you create a separate column containing the checkbox for each image, and that THAT checkbox is disabled until the image passes validation (step 3). Perhaps with an explanatory text in the column about why the image hasn't passed yet.